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The Rentier Economy, Vulture Capital,

and Enshittification

 

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate — died of malnutrition — because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

 

Introduction

What Enshittification Is. The term “enshittification” was coined by Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer and astute commentator on economic technological matters, originally from Canada. In Doctorow’s usage, it refers to a life-cycle process in which a platform progressively takes advantage of its intermediary status to exploit and abuse major stakeholder groups — sellers, buyers, workers, users, advertisers, however the relevant categories may overlap on a given platform — and uses intellectual property and other forms of legal privilege to lock in its intermediary status. In the process it becomes less and less useful for all of them, limited only by the need to provide a bare minimum of remaining use-value to keep them from leaving altogether despite the inconvenience and switching costs of doing so.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers – Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement for sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.^[1]

Doctorow elaborates on the concept in numerous places elsewhere — as do Mike Masnick and the other writers at Techdirt — as it applies to social media platforms, sharing platforms like Uber, music and movie streaming platforms, etc. But for Doctorow, it applies almost entirely to digital platforms.

In this paper, I will apply the concept of enshittification much more broadly. It applies admirably to all the ways that capitalism, historically, has extracted rents by impeding the creation of value, or by actively destroying it. And it has become still more applicable with the rise of rentier capitalism over the past two generations.

Does Enshittification Represent the End of Capitalism? In recent years McKenzie Wark, Yanis Varoufakis, and Cory Doctorow have all argued that some sort of postcapitalist system of extractive class rule has supplanted capitalism proper. This new stage in economic history — variously called “vectoralism” or “techno-feudalism” —  is cloud-based and/or rentier, rather than based primarily on markets and profit.

Much like Burnham’s Managerial Revolution thesis, the thesis vectoralism or techno-feudalism as a system of class domination distinct from capitalism is overstated. The thesis exaggerates the break between capitalism and the alleged techno-feudal successor, in much the same way that it exaggerates the sharpness of the transition between feudalism and capitalism and illegitimately downplays the role rent extraction has always played in capitalism. In fact, there is a great deal of commonality between leftist critiques of surplus extraction under classic industrial capitalism, and the ways in which digital platforms extract economic rents today.

For one thing, a major part of the transition to capitalism was played by the portion of feudal landlords who transformed their customary feudal rights into absolute land title in the modern capitalist sense, transformed peasants with customary rights into at-will tenants, and rack-rented and evicted the latter or compelled them to become agricultural wage laborers. For another, contrary to the myth of an industrial revolution funded through accumulation by “abstemious capitalists,” the landed oligarchy of Britain were silent partners who advanced a major portion of total investment capital.

As Maurice Dobb pointed out, although much of the entrepreneurship of the industrial revolution was — as argued by capitalist apologists — carried out by “new men…, devoid of privilege or social standing,” this did not negate their heavy reliance on old money for their investment capital. True enough, the new industries were, to a considerable extent, built by men from the humble ranks of master craftsmen and yeomen farmers with small savings; but the great bulk of capital by which industry was financed came from “merchant houses and from mercantile centres like Liverpool.” These humble upstarts were able to make money off their own small savings only through the favor and patronage of the old ruling class. “[A]ntagonism between the older capitalist strata and the nouveaux riches of the new industry never went very deep.”^[2]

Far from rent being merely profit’s “feudal predecessor,”^[3] there has always been a large rentier component in capitalism, and it has always been used to extract passive incomes and to destroy productive capacity or impede the production of use-value.  Even among classic industrial firms, in which physical means of production were owned by capitalists, an enormous share of profit consisted of Veblen’s “capitalized disserviceability.”

And despite Varoufakis’s framing of today’s economy — in which “owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots” are “vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital”^[4] — as a novelty, owners of physical capital long ago assumed that status in relation to finance capital, which had a similar extractive logic. Likewise, the increasing growth of “cloud serfdom” at the expense of wage labor, as a source of surplus extraction,^[5] is analogous to a similar phenomenon anticipated generations ago in Marxist analysis of monopoly capital: the extraction of profit from consumers by unequal exchange, rather than from workers in the production process.

Varoufakis’s insistence on the non-capitalist character of the emerging system places more emphasis on the essentiality of markets than of capital to capitalism; in fact he admits that it is another system of rule by capital: “it is capital that has shaken off the yoke of the capitalist market! And while capital is taking its victory lap, capitalism itself is receding.”^[6]

Wark writes of a new ‘vectoralist’ class in control of a vector that connects a supplier of materials to all stages of production and distribution in a manner that undermines, and usurps, capital. That’s not how I saw it. What she refers to as a vector choking capital seemed to me a new mutation of capital – a cloud capital so virulent that it created a new ruling class with feudallike powers to extract wealth.^[7]

Take, for example, Bret Christophers’ attempt to distinguish the rentier income of the landlord from the non-rentier income of the construction company which builds the house. The distinction is actually not so clear-cut.

Suppose a construction company builds a house for a landowner who then lets the house to a tenant. The house ‘earns’ money, in a sense, for both the construction company and the landowner. But fundamentally different types of economic activity, actor and payment are involved in each case. The construction fee is payment for the work involved in building the house, independent of the house’s ownership; if no work had been carried out, after all, there would be no house, and no payment. Thus, the construction company is not a rentier; it earns money not for controlling the asset, but for creating it. The letting fee, by contrast, is rent, and the landowner a rentier, since she receives payment only because she is the owner of the house and thus has the capacity to charge someone for the right to occupy it.^[8]

Now, it’s true that the landlord is primarily a rentier, while the construction company primarily gets its income from producing things. But the construction company and most other major actors under capitalism is, in fact, to some extent a rentier. The income of most capitalist business firms is a mixture of the returns from actually making and doing things, and the returns from in some way being the beneficiary of legal restrictions on the right to make and do things (e.g., in the case of a construction company, building codes). This has always been the case.

In short Varoufakis’ thesis, in my opinion, illegitimately downplays the continuity of classic industrial capitalism both with its feudal predecessor and with its late capitalist successor.

To be sure, despite the previous caveats, it’s entirely correct that with the rise in significance of the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) Economy and intellectual property over the past forty years, the extent of rent extraction as a share of capitalist profit — and the extent to which rent extraction has come to impede production or actually destroy value — have reached unprecedented levels.

The Nature of Rent

The concept of economic rent originally grew out of David Ricardo’s analysis of differential land rent, based on the differing fertility of different tracts of land. As population grew and expanded the “margin of cultivation” to land that was previously idle because of inferior fertility, those cultivating the new less fertile land had to expend more labor and material inputs to obtain the same level of output. As a result, the price of grain from this new land had to be higher to cover the higher production costs for making less fertile land productive. But because of the tendency for a single market price to emerge in any given locale, land-owners occupying more fertile tracts within the old margin of cultivation were able to charge a price higher than necessary to cover their costs, and thereby obtained an unearned surplus profit. So the more it costs in added labor and inputs to make the most recently cultivated ground productive, the more unearned profit obtained by owners of more fertile land already under cultivation. Henry George expanded this basic principle beyond its initial agrarian application, to include location in addition to fertility (i.e. unearned rents resulting from superior site locations for commercial and residential land). The increased value of a given location is created by the surrounding community bidding up the price of a fixed supply of land; the landlord is in a position to appropriate that value as a simple result of sitting on it, with no productive activity of their own.

More important, however, the concept of economic rent was expanded by way of analogy beyond the classical political economists’ focus on land altogether, to include a return over and above the normal market return necessary to incentivize performing any service or bringing any good to market, as a result of occupying a position of power. More broadly, it is sometimes used in reference to any kind of passive income resulting from ownership of assets rather than direct production.

But in my opinion the concept of economic rent can most usefully be generalized to cover any situation in which unearned income results from some form of power, privilege, artificial scarcity, or artificial property right. To quote Christophers again, “in essence, rent… is payment to an economic actor (the rentier) who receives that rent – and this is the key factor – purely by virtue of controlling something valuable.”^[9] The “something valuable” is, in Henry George Jr.’s terminology, “access to productive opportunities.”

In other words, it is the collection of an income, not by making or doing anything, but by controlling the conditions under which others are allowed to make or do things.

Rentier assets are as varied as rentiers themselves. Some – housing, telecommunications infrastructure, digital platforms – are physically constructed, in virtual if not real space; others – intellectual property rights, outsourcing contracts – are purely legal rather than physical constructs; and others still – land, natural resources – are not constructed at all, but simply exist spontaneously.^[10]

Thorstein Veblen’s term for this ability to collect tribute based on the power to obstruct was “capitalized disserviceability.”^[11] And anything that collects an income — including for not using artificial property rights to obstruct production — is a “factor of production.”^[12]Essentially, the ability to obstruct production, or to withhold resources from production, is defined as “productivity.”

Maurice Dobb uses the hypothetical example of toll-gates (purely to collect fees for not obstructing passage, not for actually funding upkeep on roads):

Suppose that toll-gates were a general institution, rooted in custom or ancient legal right. Could it reasonably be denied that there would be an important sense in which the income of the toll-owning class represented “an appropriation of goods produced by others” and not payment for an “activity directed to the production or transformation of economic goods?” Yet toll-charges would be fixed in competition with alternative roadways, and hence would, presumably, represent prices fixed “in an open market….” Would not the opening and shutting of toll-gates become an essential factor of production, according to most current definitions of a factor of production, with as much reason at any rate as many of the functions of the capitalist entrepreneur are so classed to-day? This factor, like others, could then be said to have a “marginal productivity” and its price be regarded as the measure and equivalent of the service it rendered. At any rate, where is a logical line to be drawn between toll-gates and property-rights over scarce resources in general?^[13]

John R. Commons made a distinction similar to that of Veblen between capitalized serviceability and capitalized disserviceability:  namely, between producing power and bargaining power, and between the ability to hold for self and withhold from others.^[14]

Christophers refers to a specific emphasis, in the analysis of rent by heterodox economists, which is also useful: its origin in extraction, rather than production.

Not only, some heterodox writers argue, is rent asset-based income; it is income associated with the extraction rather than creation of value. The rentier, that is to say, is considered a parasite; asset control enables her to arrogate to herself value created elsewhere.^[15]

Or, as Cory Doctorow put it, rentiers aim to “capture” value rather than to “create” it.^[16] It complements the other definitions of rent previously discussed because to charge tribute for not obstructing productive activity amounts to the extraction of value created by the producer.

At this point, at the risk of appearing to quibble, I believe it’s important to clarify that, contrary to Christophers’ too-sharp distinction between material and immaterial assets, the status of land and natural resources as assets for rent extraction derives not from simple physical possession or occupancy but from the legal right — which very much is constructed and immaterial — to control access to them.

The implication of this is that the distinction in mainstream economic thought between “normal profit” on production, and economic rent, should not be overemphasized. Even the industrial capitalist’s profit results, upon examination, not from actually making and doing things, but from controlling access to the conditions under which others are allowed to do so. The profit from manufacturing entails the extraction of economic rents, in the form of surplus unpaid labor which results from the institutional power of the capitalist.

The actual production process, if analyzed in terms of material flow, is at every single step of the way, from extraction of raw materials to the stocking of retail shelves, nothing but a series of actions by labor on natural resources, with different groups of workers constantly advancing their streams of production to one another and acting further on them. At no point in the process does the capitalist investor actually make or do anything; they do not construct actual machinery out of piles of money. Their property right consists entirely of a legal right to allocate the physical products of labor, enabling them to preempt the avenues by which the social labor of multiple groups of workers acting on nature can be coordinated. This legal right extends not merely to a property title to the plant and production machinery, but the conception of the credit function as “lending against” accumulated wealth and legal restriction of the credit function to those with stores of accumulated wealth (as opposed to a simple accounting mechanism for coordinating production flows).

This artificial restriction on the performance of the credit function enables capitalists to interpose themselves between different groups of producers, and present themselves as creating value rather than simply capturing value created by others. The process was described well 200 years ago by Thomas Hodgskin, who was both a socialist and a classical liberal:

Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he transfers to each a part of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share. Gradually and successively has he insinuated himself betwixt them, expanding in bulk as he has been nourished by their increasingly productive labours, and separating them so widely from each other that neither can see whence that supply is drawn which each receives through the capitalist. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted him for subsistence.^[17]

And such artificial rights, under capitalism as much as under feudalism, have always been used to impede the use of resources to their full productive capacity. Hodgskin — again — observed this phenomenon in regard to both capital and land:

If there were only the makers and users of capital to share between them the produce of their co-operating labour, the only limit to productive labour would be, that it should obtain for them and their families a comfortable subsistence. But when in addition to this, which they must have whether they be the owners of the capital or not, they must also produce as much more as satisfies the capitalist, this limit is much sooner reached. When the capitalist, being the owner of all the produce, will allow labourers neither to make nor use instruments, unless he obtains a profit over and above the subsistence of the labourer, it is plain that bounds are set to productive labour much within what Nature prescribes.^[18]

…It is… evident, that the labour which would be amply rewarded in cultivating all our waste lands, till every foot of the country became like the garden grounds about London, were all the produce of labour on those lands to be the reward of the labourer, cannot obtain from them a sufficiency to pay profit, tithes, rent, and taxes.^[19]

Ultimately, even under industrial capitalism, the distinction between material and immaterial rights was in large part artificial. Rents on material assets rested, not on actual physical possession of them, but on immaterial, socially constructed claims to control the use of those assets; conversely, immaterial rights like intellectual property consisted of the right to impede the action of labor on actual physical reality, just as much as did legal title to a factory or tract of arable land.

It’s also important to remember that, while ideologists of liberal capitalism like Smith and Ricardo attacked the parasitism of the landed classes, and industrial capital as such won a few battles like the repeal of the Corn Laws, landed elites on the whole were always a core part of the capitalist ruling class. As already mentioned, the landed oligarchy were a major segment of the capitalist class from the beginning, and were a major source of capital for industrialization.

Likewise, global capitalism has taken the form it has in large part because the enclosures were reenacted on a global scale; the capitalist growth model has always depended on the artificial abundance and cheapness of enclosed land and natural resources. Outside the writings of the classical political economists, relations between agrarian and industrial capitalists throughout the history of capitalism have been at least as collaborative as confrontational.

Christophers points this out in regard, specifically, to the history of capitalism in Great Britain:

One of the great ironies of the political-economic history of the United Kingdom is that, despite its status as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, it has never truly been an industrial nation – culturally, politically, or indeed economically. ‘Workshop to the world’ it may famously have been for a few short decades in the nineteenth century; but the reality is that, from the earliest days of its capitalist odyssey, the UK and those who steered and profited from its economy were predominantly rentierist, rather than industrialist – focused on having, rather than doing.

Central to this issue were land and landowners. Noting the historical fact – some would say curiosity – that traditional agrarian classes ‘either led or survived every major political upheaval that opened the way to the modern capitalist state, not only in Europe but in North America and Japan as well’, Perry Anderson has argued that nowhere did those tenacious traditional landowning classes prosper, both politically and economically, from the transition to capitalism more than in the UK: ‘The English estateholders had no rivals in this regard.’ For reasons including the particular thoroughness with which peasants were divorced from the means of production in the countryside, agriculture in the UK assumed a capitalist cast more rapidly and more comprehensively than anywhere else in Europe. So, consequently, did the nation’s major landowners, who by at least a century in advance of the Industrial Revolution had become what Anderson describes as ‘a capitalist stratum proper’.^[20]

The Forms and Scope of Rent

Among the forms of economic rent are landlord rent, interest on credit and monopoly returns on other financial services, returns on intellectual property (including, in the broadest sense, the profits of cloud-based sharing, social media, and retail platforms), oligopoly markups, and the price component represented by producer surpluses from entry barriers of all kinds.

The original and paradigmatic form of economic rent extraction is landlord rent. We already examined its basic functioning above, in discussing the theoretical formulations of David Ricardo and Henry George. By its very nature, it amounts to the collection of unearned wealth derived from value created by the rest of society.

In the era of monopoly capital, from the late 19th century on, the cartelization of major industries under oligopoly market structures has assumed increasing importance as a source of economic rent. Oligopoly markup, enabled by administered pricing and the price-leader system, is a profit extracted externally from the consumer via unequal exchange rather than surplus labor extracted internally through the production process. An FTC study on oligopolies in the 1960s estimated that “if highly concentrated industries were deconcentrated to the point where the four largest firms control 40% or less of an industry’s sales, prices would fall by 25% or more.”^[21] In industries under oligopoly control the typical behavior, as Paul Goodman put it, is “competing with fixed prices and slowly spooned-out improvements.”^[22]

Rents on the supply of credit — i.e., usurious interest charges — result from laws that privilege particular commodities as money, or restrict the function of supplying credit to the possessors of one form or another of stockpiled wealth. This legal framework reflects largely unstated assumptions which Schumpeter lumped together in the category of “money theories of credit” (as opposed to the “credit theories of money” put forward by thinkers like Thomas Greco and Bernard Lietaer, among others). Money theories of credit, which Schumpeter dismissed as entirely fallacious, assume that banks “lend” money (in the sense of giving up use of it) which has been “withdrawn from previous uses by an entirely imaginary act of saving and then lent out by its owners. It is much more realistic to say that the banks ‘create credit,’ than to say that they lend the deposits that have been entrusted to them.” The credit theory of money, on the other hand, treats finances “as a clearing system that cancels claims and debts and carries forward the difference….”^[23] If credit were treated purely as an accounting system, and money a unit of account, it could be organized entirely as a system of horizontal flows between groups of producers advancing production streams to one another, with no stocks of accumulated wealth required. Restricting the function to possessors of stockpiled wealth — whether savings or bank reserves — enables lenders to charge a monopoly price for it.

As Christophers points out, the price of credit hinges not so much on its technical “scarcity” as on restrictions on the right to issue it.

In truth, the economics of rent have never been only about the scarcity of the asset that the rentier controls. Indeed, the clue is right there in the word ‘controls’: the conditions under which an asset is held and commercialized are just as important to its capacity to generate rents as the conditions of its materialization in the world. An asset can be both highly valuable and incredibly scarce and yet wholly incapable of generating rents if scarcity cannot be attached to the rights to access and commercially exploit it. Equally, rent is out of the question if an asset can be readily protected by secure private property rights but it exists and is accessible in abundance. Opportunities to earn rent are predicated on the scarcity both of an asset and of the power to monetize it.

Recognition of such power is another key ingredient that was missing from Keynes’s famous critique of the functionless investor, and his call for her euthanasia. To be sure, Keynes knew the rentier had power. But this was the power specifically and only to control the supply of capital, and thus maintain its scarcity. Absent from the General Theory and Keynes’s other writings is any sense that the rentier has power to control the price of capital other than through maintaining its scarcity – or, more generally, through shaping the wider currents of supply and demand. As we have seen, Keynes believed supply (of cash) and demand (for credit) determined the rate of interest: this was why increasing supply to the extent required to end the scarcity of capital was deemed sufficient to put paid to the rentier’s ‘bonus’. Do banks have the power to command interest-based rents in a world where capital is no longer scarce? Keynes, at least implicitly, suggested not.

But he was wrong about this – a fact of which the performance of UK-based banks in the period since the financial crisis provides unequivocal evidence. Capital is no longer scarce – post-crisis UK monetary policy has seen to that, having ‘flooded the market with cheap money’, in the words of one commentator.  Real interest rates, as we have seen, have been stuck for a decade at lows not seen since the 1970s (and then only fleetingly). But the classical financial rentier has continued to make hay….

If substantially stretched spreads represent the proximate explanation for this good fortune, the more interesting and important question concerns how, in turn, we should understand them. How, in short, has it been possible for UK-based banks to realize these spreads? It plainly has nothing to do with supply (which is plentiful) and demand. This is not asset scarcity in action; rather, the only credible explanation is scarcity of power. What the above developments highlight is the enormous power of the UK banking sector to subvert the dynamics of supply and demand by virtue of the fact that this power is itself scarce. The Bank of England’s error in assuming or trusting that commercial banks would pass on its rate cuts to their borrowers was in thinking, like Keynes, that supply and demand rule – or, in other words, that financial markets, where supply and demand for capital interact, have power over the banks operating in those markets. Developments of the past decade show that they do not; big banks are not meek price-takers, but price-makers. They can take the low borrowing rates available from the market with one hand and also take (charging their own borrowers rates appropriate for a scenario of capital scarcity, but in a world where capital is not scarce) with the other.

The capacity to pull off this trick is in fact largely innate. Under capitalism, private banks have long had almost complete control over the supply of new credit. ‘In modern economies, such as the UK’, Laurie Macfarlane and his colleagues note, ‘money in circulation created by the state – physical cash – only represents around 3% of the total money supply. The remaining 97% is lent in to economies as the digital IOUs of commercial banks – the deposits that are entered in to our bank accounts when banks make new loans.’ In theory, competition between banks should prevent them from abusing this innate, privatized power. But that is only the theory. Ownership of the vast stock of UK banking system assets…, and with it control over the pricing of those assets at the moment of their creation, is highly concentrated – and it has become more so in the past two decades. That is to say, the inherently scarce power to create, price and monetize credit has become scarcer.^[24]

Mariana Mazzucato, similarly, argues that the “deregulation” regime lobbied for by banks did not extend to an actual full deregulation that extended to abolishing the state’s power to license banks. To maintain high profits, banks needed the state’s help to exclude potential competitors. The use of licenses to restrict competition between banks empowered them to control the pace of money creation.

That banks create money is still a highly contested notion. It was politically unmentionable in 1980s America and Europe, where economic policy was predicated on a ‘monetarism’ in which governments precisely controlled the supply of money, whose growth determined inflation. Banks traditionally presented themselves purely as financial intermediaries, usefully channelling household depositors’ savings into business borrowers’ investment. Mainstream economists accepted this characterization, and its implication that banks play a vital economic role in ‘mobilizing’ savings. Banks are not only empowered to create money as well as channel it from one part of the economy to another; they also do remarkably little to turn households’ savings into business investment. In fact, in the US case, when the flow of funds is analysed in detail, households ‘invest’ their savings entirely in the consumption of durable goods while large businesses finance their investment through their own retained profits.

They also had to overlook the fact that money appears from nowhere when firms or households invest more than their savings, and borrow the difference. When a bank makes you a loan, say for a mortgage, it does not hand over cash. It credits your account with the amount of the mortgage. Instantly, money is created…. As a matter of fact, only about 3 per cent of the money in the UK economy is cash (or what is sometimes called fiat money, i.e. any legal tender backed by government). Banks create all the rest. It wasn’t until after the 2008 crisis that the Bank of England admitted that ‘loans create deposits’, and not vice versa.^[25]

Other sources of rent include intellectual property like patents and copyright. Patents played a central role in cartelizing the industrial economy from the late 19th century on, and enabling corporate enclosure of the benefits of technological progress; their role has been even more central, over the past generation, in enabling corporations to enclose outsourced production and global supply chains within corporate walls. Copyright was relatively marginal in importance until recently, but has been the central driver of media and platform enshittification in the digital era.

The Late Capitalist Economy

Although rent has always been a significant part of capitalism, over the past couple of generations it has grown enormously as a total share of capitalist profit. An unprecedented share of returns result from the obstruction of productive activity, or even the active dismantling of productive capacity, by rentiers who find the returns greater than those from production.

Even though rents were integral to industrial capitalism, and profit on industrial production reflected privilege of one sort or another, rent-extraction in recent years has gone far beyond the levels of the industrial era and reached the point of crowding out or actively destroying production to an unprecedented extent.

The whole point of rentier capitalism is not to extract surplus value from the production process, as in the classic industrial capitalist model, but to inflate the value of intangible assets as a source of income — even when it means impeding or destroying physical production. As Marjorie Kelly observes, “The system now drains income flows from production and consumption to support higher asset valuations.”^[26]

A swelling of debt is one way this is accomplished. For example, when private equity buys firms, it often places substantial new debt on those portfolio companies, then uses the cash to write the PE fund and its investors a large check, in a sleight-of-hand maneuver benignly named dividend recapitalization. Once the PE fund sells that firm, the company is left responsible for paying down the onerous debt, which often means cutting staffing levels in order to manage the cash outflow. Income to labor has been drained. Income to finance has been boosted. And in a significant number of instances, debt-laden firms end up bankrupt.

We see the same redirection of flows inside publicly traded corporations. Major corporations in recent years have pretty much stopped investing their profits in research and innovation or in paying higher wages, instead directing the lion’s share of profits to share buybacks and dividends paid out to shareholders. A study in the Harvard Business Review — bluntly titled “Why Stock Buybacks Are Dangerous for the Economy” — showed that between 2009 and 2018, companies in the S&P 500 used an astronomical 91 percent of net income on these two forms of payouts to shareholders. Much of what the firms invested in turned out to be thin air: inflated stock market valuations that later deflated. (Though often not before CEOs profited handsomely.)

According to Gerald Epstein and Juan Antonio Montecino at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, if all this sucking action by finance weren’t going on — if the financial sector had remained its optimal size, performing its traditional, useful roles — the typical US household would have enjoyed double the wealth at retirement.^[27]

As an indication of the extent to which the economy has been financialized and rentierized, Guy Standing writes that the value of financial assets (“including equities, private, corporate and government debt, and deposits”) quadrupled compared to global GDP from 1980 to 2007.^[28] And according to Mazzucato, starting in the early 1980s U.S. financial sector profits began rising from their steady 15-20 percent share of total corporate profits during the postwar period, eventually peaking at over 40% in the early 21st century. Although it fell during the Great Crash, it peaked again at 35%^[29] and has never fallen below the 20s.^[30]

Today, the sector has sprawled way beyond the limits of traditional finance, mainly banking, to cover an immense array of financial instruments and has created a new force in modern capitalism: asset management. The financial sector now accounts for a significant and growing share of the economy’s value added and profits. But only 15 percent of the funds generated go to businesses in non-financial industries. The rest is traded between financial institutions, making money simply from money changing hands…. Or, put another way: when finance makes money by serving not the ‘real’ economy, but itself.^[31]

But equally important “is the effect of financial motives on non-financial sectors, e.g. industries such as energy, pharmaceuticals and IT,” which includes such things as “the provision of financial instruments for customers – for example, car manufacturers offering finance to their customers – and, more importantly, the use of profits to boost share prices rather than reinvest in actual production.^[32]

So-called ‘idea-intensive’ firms – in pharmaceuticals, media, finance and information technology – now account for 31 per cent of the profits of Western corporations, up from 17 per cent in 1999. They are global rentiers, deriving income from possession of ‘intangible assets’ such as patents, brands and copyright under a strengthened intellectual property regime constructed since the 1990s.

One US study suggests that the whole of the decline in the labour share is due to a rise in the capital share of intellectual property, in which the intellectual property owners have captured all the resulting productivity gains.^[33]

Intellectual property is also the main legal bulwark for the global economy. The neoliberal model of the past forty years has been to outsource increasing shares of actual production to nominally independent contractors in low-wage countries of the Global South, while using intellectual property, marketing, and finance to enforce a legal monopoly on disposal of the finished product and integrate networked logistic chains under corporate control.

This is what Naomi Klein, in No Logo, calls the “Nike model.” She quotes John Ermatinger, then head of Levi Strauss’s American division:

Our strategic plan in North America is to focus intensely on brand management, marketing and product design as a means to meet the casual clothing wants and needs of consumers. Shifting a significant portion of our manufacturing from the U.S. and Canadian markets to contractors throughout the world will give the company greater flexibility to allocate resources and capital to its brands.^[34]

A growing share of companies, according to Klein, “now bypass production completely.”

Instead of making the products themselves, in their own factories, they “source” them, much as corporations in the natural-resource industries source uranium, copper or logs. They close existing factories, shifting to contracted-out, mostly offshore, manufacturing.^[35]

Nike “has become a prototype for the product-free brand,” with many other companies following its lead in outsourcing all actual production.^[36]

Advances in technology are making the actual means of physical production increasingly cheap and ephemeral — a state of affairs which threatens the traditional basis of profit. The original rationale for large-scale factory production and the wage system was the rising cost of machinery. According to John Curl, a historian of worker cooperatives, cooperative production was only viable so long as the primary means of production were general-purpose craft tools owned by individual workers. That was the basis of cooperative production as organized by Owenites in the early- to mid-19th century, when unemployed workers set up cooperative shops using their own tools under a common roof. The cost of production machinery increased astronomically during the Industrial Revolution, rendering this model obsolete. The means of production became so expensive that only the very rich, or associations of the very rich, could afford to own them. Workers were reduced to wage labor with machinery owned by someone else. The lack of capital to finance factory production was the main reason the Knights of Labor foundered in their attempts to set up cooperative production on the Owenite model.^[37]

Current trends in production technology are a direct reversal of this process, and undermine the technological basis for wage labor and factory production. When goods whose production formerly required factories worth millions of dollars, come within the capability of neighborhood or community cooperative workshops with machinery costing two orders of magnitude less, the dependence of workers on the wage system is decreased. Capitalist employers are increasingly forced to compete with the possibility of self-employment or cooperative employment, driving the rate of profit down.

Intellectual property is an end-run around this tendency, eliminating the threat from small-scale means of production by workers themselves through the ownership of a legal monopoly on the right to produce the product. It represents a shift from surplus labor extraction via direct ownership of the means of production and control of the production process, to surplus extraction from controlling the conditions under which others are allowed to use their own production machinery.

As Klein puts it: “After establishing the ‘soul’ of their corporations, the superbrand companies have gone on to rid themselves of their cumbersome bodies….”^[38]

Companies that were traditionally satisfied with a 100 percent markup between the cost of factory production and the retail price have been scouring the globe for factories that can make their products so inexpensively that the markup is closer to 400 percent.

And in most countries of the Global South, rather than raising wages, Western corporations’ offshoring production has actually caused the labor share of value-added to fall. This is because the ownership of intellectual property puts Western corporations, to a greater extent than native employers a generation ago, in a monopsony position.^[39]

Local governments are in a position of competing for contracts from Western corporations, offering

tax breaks, lax regulations, and the services of a military willing and able to crush labor unrest. To sweeten the pot further, they put their own people on the auction block, falling over each other to offer up the lowest minimum wage, allowing workers to be paid less than the real cost of living.”^[40]

As one Indonesian industry association leader put it: “If the authorities don’t handle strikes…, we will lose our foreign buyers. The government’s income from exports will decrease and unemployment will worsen.”^[41]

In the late capitalist economy, even corporations nominally devoted to the provision of goods and services actually make most of their profit from rent extraction — lending, IP ownership, or land ownership. For example, McDonald’s:

If you were to ask one hundred people what the primary business of McDonald’s is, ninety-nine would doubtless say something along the lines of ‘fast-food production and retail’. But this is simply not the case. McDonald’s is chiefly a rentier. Worldwide, approximately 93 per cent of McDonald’s restaurant businesses are owned and operated by franchisees – independent individuals or companies – rather than by McDonald’s Corporation itself. This begs the question: if those franchised restaurants are independent of McDonald’s as a corporate entity, how does the latter make money from them?

The answer is by licensing its intellectual property: letting its franchisees use its brand name, its design features (the famous Golden Arches, for example), its restaurant layout templates, its menus, its recipes – in short, its intellectual assets. For the privilege, McDonald’s franchisees hand over an initial franchise fee (giving them franchise rights for a typical term of twenty years) plus an ongoing royalty calculated as a percentage of net sales (gross sales minus any local sales tax), which in the UK case is currently set at 9.5 per cent, comprising a 5 per cent ‘service fee’ and a 4.5 per cent contribution to company advertising.^[42]

Chain operations like McDonald’s also make a substantial portion of their profit as real estate holding companies, leasing locations to franchises. As Christophers notes, “in 2018, real estate rents paid by McDonald’s franchisees worldwide, totalling $7.1 billion, were nearly double their royalty payments of $3.9 billion.”^[43]

And as actual production has been outsourced to nominally independent contractors, for many “industrial” corporations, the credit arms eclipsed manufacturing as the primary source of profit. Auto makers, in Cory Doctorow’s words, “reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then ‘securitizing’ the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.”^[44] Most notably GM’s finance arm — General Motors Acceptance Corporation — is its biggest profit center. Mariana Mazzucato lists a number of other prominent examples:

In the 2000s…, the US arm of Ford made more money by selling loans for cars than by selling the cars themselves. Ford sped up the car’s transition from physical product to financial commodity by pioneering the Personal Contract Plan (PCP), which allowed a ‘buyer’ to pay monthly installments that only covered the predicted depreciation, and trade up to a new model after two or three years rather than paying off the balance. Adopted by most other automakers, and with the additional merit of being bundled into securitizations and resold on financial markets, PCPs drove car sales to record levels, alarming only the final regulators, who wondered what would happen if (as with houses in 2008) cash-strapped contractees walked away from their vehicles and handed back the keys. Over the same period GE Capital, the finance arm of the enormous General Electric (GE) group, made around half of the whole group’s earnings. Companies such as Ford and GE contributed heavily to the sharp rise in the value of financial assets relative to US GDP in the quarter-century after 1980.^[45]

More broadly, this financialization is characteristic of most of the former industrial economy. David Graeber writes:

During most of the twentieth century, large industrial corporations were very much independent of, and to some degree even hostile to, the interests of what was called “high finance:’…. It was only in the 1970s that the financial sector and the executive classes — that is, the upper echelons of the various corporate bureaucracies — effectively fused. CEOs began paying themselves in stock options, moving back and forth between utterly unrelated companies, priding themselves on the number of employees they could lay off. This set off a vicious cycle whereby workers, who no longer felt any loyalty to corporations that felt none toward them, had to be increasingly monitored, managed, and surveilled.^[46]

Under capitalism, in the classic sense of the term, profits derive from the management of production: capitalists hire people to make or build or fix or maintain things, and they cannot take home a profit unless their total overhead — including the money they pay their workers and contractors — comes out less than the value of the income they receive from their clients or customers. Under classic capitalist conditions of this sort it does indeed make no sense to hire unnecessary workers. Maximizing profits means paying the least number of workers the least amount of money possible; in a very competitive market, those who hire unnecessary workers are not likely to survive. Of course, this is why doctrinaire libertarians, or, for that matter, orthodox Marxists, will always insist that our economy can’t really be riddled with bullshit jobs; that all this must be some sort of illusion. But by a feudal logic, where economic and political considerations overlap, the same behavior makes perfect sense…. [T]he whole point is to grab a pot of loot, either by stealing it from one’s enemies or extracting it from commoners by means of fees, tolls, rents, and levies, and then redistributing it. In the process, one creates an entourage of followers that is both the visible measure of one’s pomp and magnificence, and at the same time, a means of distributing political favor: for instance, by buying off potential malcontents, rewarding faithful allies (goons), or creating an elaborate hierarchy of honors and titles for lower-ranking nobles to squabble over.

If all of this very much resembles the inner workings of a large corporation, I would suggest that this is no coincidence: such corporations are less and less about making, building, fixing, or maintaining things and more and more about political processes of appropriating, distributing, and allocating money and resources. This means that, once again, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish politics and economics, as we have seen with the advent of “too-big-to-fail” banks, whose lobbyists typically write the very laws by which government supposedly regulates them, but even more, by the fact that financial profits themselves are gathered largely through direct juro-political means. JPMorgan Chase & Co., for example, the largest bank in America, reported in 2006 that roughly two-thirds of its profits were derived from “fees and penalties;’ and “finance” in general really refers to trading in other people’s debts — debts which, of course, are enforceable in courts of law.

It’s almost impossible to get accurate figures about exactly what proportion of a typical family’s income in, say, America, or Denmark, or Japan, is extracted each month by the FIRE sector, but there is every reason to believe it is not only a very substantial chunk but also is now a distinctly greater chunk of total profits than those the corporate sector derives directly from making or selling goods and services in those same countries. Even those firms we see as the very heart of the old industrial order — General Motors and General Electric in America, for example — now derive all, or almost all, of their profits from their own financial divisions. GM, for example, makes its money not from selling cars but rather from interest collected on auto loans.^[47]

Put them together — profits from franchise fees, intellectual property, real estate, and finance — and an enormous share of the “industrial economy” is actually a rentier economy whose primary source of profit comes from the power to interfere with production by others.

Rentiers, Guy Standing argues, “have been the winners of the globalization era.” One study found that, “across the industrialized world,” profit rose as a share of total income between the 1960s and 1990s. But rentier income — narrowly defined as return on financial assets — accounted for most of the increased profit.

Excluding capital gains from financial assets, the countries in which the rentier share increased most were, in order: France, the UK, South Korea, the USA, Germany, Australia and Belgium. By 2000, rental income from financial assets accounted for over 20 percent of income in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the USA, with the UK and Italy catching up.

If capital gains on financial assets are included, the rise in the rentier share was even greater. Here the USA stands out. The rentier share rose more than sevenfold between 1980 and 2000. By then, rental income, as narrowly defined, accounted for over a third of national income, up from about a fifth before the Global Transformation started. The share of income going to profits in non-financial sectors actually fell.

Meanwhile, deindustrialisation has been relentless. During the early twentieth century, agriculture shrank to less than 3 percent of US national income, while manufacturing began its steep decline. In 1950, manufacturing accounted for 28 per cent of GDP. By the time of the crash of 2008, its share was down to 11 per cent. The symbolic year was 1985, when financial services (banking, property, insurance, advertising and marketing) first accounted for more of national income than manufacturing. The financial sector’s profits – interest, rents and dividends – have continued to rise relative to those from non-financial activity and now account for about 40 percent of all domestic profits.^[48]

All of this was to a great extent unavoidable, given the structural presuppositions of capitalism and the crisis tendencies it began experiencing around fifty years ago. Thirty years ago, during the recession of the early 90s, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy of Monthly Review wrote of the seemingly puzzling — to orthodox economics — phenomenon of the financial sector exploding while the productive economy stagnated. Neoliberal economics — as it still does — explained the finance sector’s function as simply intermediating between personal savings and investment in productive enterprise.

In search of an explanation of these seemingly contradictory happenings, you might first turn to one of the available textbooks from which our youth learn their economics. But you would be disappointed, for there you would be instructed that the function of finance is to serve production — facilitate payments, raise capital to found new enterprises or expand existing ones, etc. Production is primary, finance secondary. The two are as closely intertwined as Siamese twins: they prosper together in good times and suffer in bad. The very idea of an explosion of finance along with sagging production is nowhere hinted at, let alone explained….

…[A]n observer of the present economic scene might cry out, “Isn’t there any one around here who understands how this capitalist system works?” And the honest answer would have to be that there isn’t, at least not if you confine your attention to the accredited keepers and purveyors of economic wisdom.^[49]

The simple fact of the matter is that capitalism’s imperative for capital accumulation has always run up against the fact — the central theme of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s 1966 book Monopoly Capital — that the ability of capitalists to reinvest their accumulated surplus is limited by the nature of the capitalist system itself. Opportunities for profitable investment in productive enterprise are limited by the lack of sufficient aggregate demand to employ existing productive capacity, let alone justify expanding it.

This tendency towards surplus capital and idle production capacity almost destroyed capitalism in the Great Depression, but thanks to massive military spending from the beginning of WWII right up to the present, combined with the destruction of most industrial plant and equipment outside the United States, the crisis was postponed for another generation. But by around 1970, with the reconstruction of physical capital in Western Europe and the Pacific Rim, the crisis resumed. The solution to the renewed crisis of surplus capital was a combination of capital export to the Third World, and a radical expansion of the FIRE economy as a sink for capital with no productive outlet.

But, contrary to the liberal reformist narrative that financialization is a deformation of capitalism, to be corrected as a step toward restoring the “good” kind of industrial capitalism that prevailed after WWII, the reality is that financialization exists out of necessity. Financialization is the reason capitalism hasn’t collapsed from the renewed tendency towards surplus capital and stagnation since the 1970s. The old model of industrial capitalism cannot be restored. As Magdoff and Sweezy wrote:

Does the casino society in fact channel far too much talent and energy into financial shell games? Yes, of course. No sensible person could deny it. Does it do so at the expense of producing real goods and services? Absolutely not. There is no reason whatever to assume that if you could deflate the financial structure, the talent and energy now employed there would move into productive pursuits. They would simply become unemployed and add to the country’s already huge reservoir of idle human and material resources. Is the casino society a significant drag on economic growth? Again, absolutely not. What growth the economy has experienced in recent years, apart from that attributable to an unprecedented peacetime military build-up, has been almost entirely due to the financial explosion.

We can now see why, though everyone deplores the increasingly outrageous excesses of the financial explosion and is aware of its inherent dangers, nothing is being done — or even seriously proposed— to bring it under control. Quite the contrary: every time a catastrophe threatens, the authorities spring into action to put out the fire — and in the process spread more inflammable material around for the next flare-up to feed on. The reason is simply that if the explosion were brought under control, even assuming that it could be done without triggering a chain reaction of bankruptcies, the overall economy would be sent into a tailspin.^[50]

Financialization meant that investment went, not into new forms of production, but — as Yanis Varoufakis notes — into the buying up of control in the existing economy by private equity and asset managers of all kinds.

With investment first knocked out by the crash of 2008 and finished off soon after by austerity, throwing new money at the financiers was never going to resurrect it. Put yourself in the position of a capitalist at a time when austerity is eliminating your customers’ income. Suppose I give you a billion dollars to play with for free, i.e. at a zero interest rate. Naturally you will take the free billion but as we’ve established you would be mad to invest it in new production lines. So what are you going to do with the free cash? You could buy real estate or art or, better still, shares in your own company. That way, the shares in your company appreciate in value and, if you are the CEO running it, your stature and share-linked bonuses rise too. No new investment, in other words, but a lot more power in the hands of the powerful.^[51]

Christophers and Mazzucato recount the explosion of asset-management ownership over the economy. Christophers writes:

The first area of the mushrooming asset-management business to receive meaningful critical attention in terms of its implications for wider society was, interestingly, a relatively small business niche: private equity. The label ‘private equity’ is often used to signify a type of business – Carlyle Group is a private-equity firm, people will say – but it is more accurately applied to a type of asset, or what is commonly referred to as a particular ‘asset class’. Private equity, in short, is one of the various things that asset managers can and do invest in – specifically, equity (company shares) that is not traded on public exchanges, as distinct from tradeable ‘public equity’, such as shares in Apple or Amazon. What people call private-equity firms, then, are in fact better understood as asset managers that happen to invest mainly or exclusively in the private-equity asset class.^[52]

And according to Mazzucato, in the period between 2000 and 2013, the percentage of companies owned by private equity more than tripled, from roughly ten percent to roughly 37 percent. For companies worth over $500 million, the increase was from 2 percent to 12 percent.^[53]

More broadly, ownership not just by private equity but by asset-managing firms of all kinds has exploded. According to Christophers, assets under management by such companies grew from “probably… not much more than $100 million” forty years ago to over $100 trillion in 2020.^[54] Asset-management firms own 30-40% of the typical S&P 500 company, compared to virtually nil in the 1980s. The three biggest alone — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — between them own over 20% of shares in the typical firm.^[55]

Much of the money managed by asset managers is invested in financial assets, such as shares (in the United States, ‘stocks’) and bonds – but not all of it; and, in relative terms, less and less of it. In recent times, asset managers have been investing ever more of the money with which pension schemes, insurance companies and the like entrust them not in financial assets but in assets of two other kinds….

The first of the two consists of various types of housing – ‘multi-family’ apartment blocks…, standalone homes, student housing, care homes, and even manufactured-housing (‘mobile home’) communities. The second kind of asset includes all those physical things typically grouped together under the capacious term ‘infrastructure’. This term denotes the basic physical ‘stuff’ that enables modern society to function, from water-supply networks to roads, and from hospitals to electricity-transmission grids.^[56]

Although asset-management companies’ real estate investments have been predominantly in multi-family dwellings — apartment complexes — American companies began buying up foreclosed single-family homes on a significant scale in 2008 (although this is a phenomenon limited mainly to the United States). There has also been a growing interest in investing in mobile home parks; the owner of one company specializing in trailer parks characterized them as “like a Waffle House where the customers are chained to their booths.”^[57] Bret Christophers estimates the total value of residential real estate owned by asset-management firms at around $1 trillion.^[58]

A favorite target of private equity and other asset-management firms is privatized infrastructure. Christophers:

The neoliberal era across the Global North has been an era of unprecedented privatization, and nowhere more than in the UK, which has been privatization’s undisputed trailblazer since the first Thatcher administration began. Vast quantities of public assets have been sold off to the private sector (often on the cheap), in the process massively expanding the territory, in particular, of infrastructure rents – through the privatization of water supply networks, energy transmission and distribution networks, telecommunications networks, and so on….^[59]

Since Margaret Thatcher kick-started the programme in the early 1980s, the UK has come to be seen as the world’s undisputed privatization trailblazer, and is acknowledged as such both by those broadly supportive of the project – the Financial Times refers to ‘pioneering Britain’ – and those resolutely opposed – Joe Guinan and Thomas Hanna, for example, describing privatization as ‘a very British disease’. Less often recognized, though, is the fact that most major UK privatizations were privatizations of a very particular type. They involved the transfer to private ownership of state-owned enterprises with substantial asset bases, and more specifically substantial infrastructural assets; and those assets were typically used for the delivery to the public of services generally referred to as ‘utilities’, including but not limited to energy supply (electricity and gas), water and sewerage, telephony, and certain forms of transport.^[60]

“One common form is the concession, which is a time-limited franchise to manage and operate an asset and – crucially – receive any income that it generates. The body granting the concession is frequently, but not always, in the public sector.”^[61]

Alongside concessions, the other principal type of long-term contract through which asset managers hold physical infrastructure assets is the much-discussed public – private partnership (PPP). Although it takes somewhat different forms in different countries, the core elements of a PPP can be simply stated. It involves the public sector commissioning a private-sector actor to build and then operate – over a defined period – a physical asset of some kind, which might for instance be a road, a hospital or a school.^[62]

Although asset managers outright own some privatized transportation infrastructures, privatization takes the form primarily of concessions or public-private partnership contracts.^[63]

Telecom infrastructures owned by asset managers include wireless transmission, fiber-optic networks, and data centers.^[64]

Ownership of water supply infrastructure by asset-management firms is most widespread in the UK. Although it has been considerably less common in the United States, the phenomenon has expanded significantly in recent years.^[65]

Perhaps the most pathological illustration of the new rentier economy and the asset stripping it creates is a new category of investment asset, which recapitulates, on a higher level, the original model of land rent as paradigm: “ecosystem services.”

In one paradigm, Wall Street is laying plans to begin extracting wealth from ecosystem services through Natural Asset Companies (NACs), a new vehicle announced in 2021 by the New York Stock Exchange and Intrinsic Exchange Group. It’s about “pioneering a new asset class,” the sponsors said, which will capture and convert the productive value of natural assets like forests, water, coral reefs, and farms into investor returns. “Natural assets produce an estimated $125 trillion annually in global ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, biodiversity and clean water,” the NYSE website exulted.

Linger a moment over that extraordinary number: $125 trillion — the mouthwatering wealth extraction to be realized. For context, consider that the total value of the US stock market is $46 trillion. That means so-called ecosystem services — the natural world, life — is “worth” almost three times as much.^[66]

The practice has been around to a considerable extent, obviously, ever since the first stratum of land-owners began extracting tribute from those who cultivated it; and it’s been expanded piecemeal through private forests, mines, aquifers, and the like. But now it’s being consolidated into a single conceptual category that embraces enclosing the entire biosphere, and converting the free productive gifts of nature into a revenue stream for rent-extracting private owners.

The Extractive Economy and Enshittification

In functional terms, the growing scale of rent as a share of total profit means an economy in which an increasing amount of investment takes the form of extraction or value-destruction rather than production. An unprecedented amount of profit comes from the ability to thwart production and progress by holding things out of use or actually destroying them. This new model is variously called “strip-shop capitalism” and “vulture capitalism,” and its effects on productivity and quality are perfectly encapsulated in Cory Doctorow’s term “Enshittification.” Although Doctorow, who coined the term, uses it almost exclusively to describe the ways in which tech companies make their platforms unusable for buyers and sellers, the principle applies much more broadly to the entire rentier economy.

As Mazzucato argues, orthodox capitalist economics, with the assumption that income is distributed according to marginal productivity, ignores the possibility “that some activities perpetually earn rent because they are perceived as valuable, while actually blocking the creation of value and/or destroying existing value….”^[67]

Christophers, after noting Marx’s view on the centrality of competition to technological progress under capitalism, continued:

The monopoly power inherent to rentierism, by contrast, is generally inimical to dynamism and innovation. Spared the coercive forces of competition buffeting other capitalists, the rentier ordinarily opts for a quiet life, focusing her energies on sweating existing income-generating assets – shoring up the defences arrayed around them, fighting any attempts to stem the flows of money they elicit – rather than, for example, innovating in the interest of developing new products or services.^[68]

The growth of the financial sector in the neoliberal era, far from contributing to greater productivity or output, reflects — as we saw above — the stagnation of opportunities for profit in genuinely productive activity. Mazzucato challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the financial sector’s economic contributions.

Yet the belief that economic progress requires a growing financial sector, with banks at the heart of it, is counter-intuitive on a number of counts. If financial intermediaries promote economic growth by mobilizing capital and giving it better uses, national output (GDP) could be expected to grow faster than financial-sector output, thus diminishing its share of GDP. This must indeed be the case for many of the most successful ‘newly industrializing countries’, if – as they claim – the US and UK financial sectors have outgrown their home economies through the export of capital and services to the rest of the world. If banks and financial markets become more efficient, firms should make increased use of their services over time, losing their early preference for internal financing of investment out of retained profit. In practice, numerous studies find that firms continue to finance most of their investment (in production and new product development) internally through retentions, because external financers know less about their activities and offset their greater risk by demanding a higher return. 2 And over time, financial markets should, by gaining efficiency, be able to expand at the expense of banks, which are usually explained as an alternative mechanism for channelling funds from savers to borrowers when equity and bond markets are insufficiently developed and information isn’t flowing freely. Yet even in modern capitalist economies banks have entrenched their role at the centre of the financial universe, to the extent of commanding wholesale rescue when their solvency and liquidity drained away in 2008.^[69]

The ‘banking problem’ arose because, as the twentieth century progressed, banks’ role in fuelling economic development steadily diminished in theory and practice – while their success in generating revenue and profit, through operations paid for by households, firms and governments, steadily increased. A fast-expanding part of the economy in the middle of the twentieth century was not being accounted for. The economists (like Schumpeter and Gerschenkron) who had ascribed banks a key role in development were nevertheless clear that they achieved this through exercising a degree of monopoly power, collecting rent as well as profit. Mainstream opinion, meanwhile, continued to view banks as intermediaries which, in charging to connect buyers and sellers (or borrowers and savers), made their income by capturing value from others rather than creating it themselves. Indeed today, if we use the value-added formula, we find that the financial sector, far from contributing 7.2 per cent of GDP to the UK economy and 7.3 per cent to the US (as the 2016 national accounts showed), in fact makes a contribution to output that is zero, or even negative. By this yardstick it is profoundly, fundamentally unproductive to society.^[70]

How Asset Management Destroys the Productive Capacity and Guts the Value of Its Acquisitions. Aside from the FIRE economy being a diversion of resources from productive sectors, rentiers — private equity or hedge funds — are also prone to destroying the productive capacity of any enterprises they acquire in the industrial and service sectors. They are likely to treat their existing assets as cash cows for asset stripping.

“[Hyman] Minsky charted the way in which the banking system would eventually end up moving to ‘speculative finance’, pursuing returns that depended on the appreciation of asset values rather than the generation of income from productive activity.”^[71]

According to theories that view the financial sector as productive, ever-expanding finance does not harm the economy; indeed, it actually facilitates the circulation of goods and services. Yet all too often investment funds and banks act to increase their profits rather than channel the proceeds into other forms of investment, such as green technology. Macquarie, the Australian bank which used post-privatization acquisitions to become one of the world’s largest infrastructure investors, quickly became known for securing additional debts against these assets so that more of their revenues were channelled into interest payments, alongside distributions to shareholders. After acquiring Thames Water in 2006, it used securitization to raise the company’s debt from £3.2 billion to £7.8 billion by 2012, while avoiding major infrastructure investment…^[72]

As Cory Doctorow describes it, private equity is “an ‘investment’ system that loads up useful, functioning real-economy businesses with debt, extracts all their value, and then leaves them to fail.”^[73] It bears close resemblance to a Mafia practice, with the difference that it’s legal.

Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”…

It’s a good racket – for the racketeers. Private equity has grown from a finance sideshow to Wall Street’s apex predator, and it’s devouring the real economy through a string of audacious bust outs, each more consequential and depraved than the last.

As PE shows that it can turn profitable businesses into gigantic windfalls, sticking the rest of us with the job of sorting out the smoking craters they leave behind, more and more investors are piling in.^[74]

Another colorful description of the private equity model came from Thomas Katterton Williams on Bluesky: “The answer to so many questions—why did this chain go out of biz, why are durable goods so flimsy, whatever happened to this believed publication—is ‘it wasn’t returning 300% to the worst assholes in the entire world.’”^[75]

The key point is that it’s the acquired firm — not the private equity buyers — that takes on the acquisition debt, and the cost of servicing it comes out of its revenues.

Crucially, when investing with leverage in infrastructure or housing, it is not the investment fund itself that borrows money and subsequently shoulders the debt. Rather, the debt goes onto the balance sheet either of the company that the fund has acquired or – as for example in the case of the acquisition not of a company but of a physical asset such as an apartment block or wind farm – of a holding company established by the asset manager to hold the acquired asset. Furthermore, it is usually so-called nonrecourse debt, meaning that creditors only ever have a potential claim specifically on those assets against which the debt is collateralised.

Hence, if trouble arises in repaying the debt, it is not the investment fund, still less its general partner, that is on the hook.^[76]

The pressures of short-termism mean that long-term capital investment is only undertaken when it can be monetized for returns in the short-term.^[77]

Some businesses acquired through leveraged buyouts are struggling before the acquisition, but they all struggle after the buyout. After all, once the business has been acquired, it has a huge new debt load: the money that was borrowed against its assets to pay for it to be taken over. The new owners typically commemorate their purchase by paying themselves huge special dividends and emptying the business’s coffers, and then set about finding “efficiencies” that the business’s precarious, debt-heavy position demands.

Typically, this means some combination of selling and laying off assets and workers. Physical plants are sold off and either leased back or done away with altogether, in favor of outsourced suppliers, sometimes overseas where labor is cheap. Lifelong staff are fired — with unionized staff preferentially targeted for cuts — and either replaced by cheaper workers, or by colleagues who are now expected to do two (or three, or four) employees’ work.^[78]

Indeed, asset managers — especially in cases of closed-end funds — have strong incentives to avoid capital expenditures altogether.

If asset managers that run closed-end funds are incentivised to squeeze operating expenditures associated with real-asset investments, they have an even greater incentive to avoid capital expenditures – that is, expenditures that are expected to provide utility beyond the very near term. After all, if the overriding objective is to exit within, say, three to five years of investment, there will in general be no reason to spend money whose returns would be realised wholly or primarily beyond that limited time horizon. It would be economically irrational to do so; and the closer to exit the asset manager edges, needless to say, the smaller the incentive becomes to invest for the long term.

And thus we arrive at the real-asset asset manager’s… golden rule… to avoid, generally speaking, any capital expenditure.^[79]

Brendan Ballou at the New York Times summarizes private equity’s record of destruction:

Companies bought by private equity firms are far more likely to go bankrupt than companies that aren’t. Over the last decade, private equity firms were responsible for nearly 600,000 job losses in the retail sector alone. In nursing homes, where the firms have been particularly active, private equity ownership is responsible for an estimated — and astounding — 20,000 premature deaths over a 12-year period, according to a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Similar tales of woe abound in mobile homes, prison health care, emergency medicine, ambulances, apartment buildings and elsewhere. Yet private equity and its leaders continue to prosper, and executives of the top firms are billionaires many times over.^[80]

The 2017 Toys R Us bankruptcy, after vulture capitalists loaded it up with debt and cashed out, became the paradigmatic example of private equity in the American press. It paid out $8 million in executive bonuses right before declaring bankruptcy — but no severance pay for its 33,000 workers. KKR and Bain Capital — public anger toward the latter of which Mitt Romney condemned as prejudice against “the successful” — bought it out in 2005, saddling it with $5 billion in acquisition debt.^[81]

The mismanagement of the company, including starving of investments it needed to remain competitive, was straight out of the private equity playbook.

But she noticed a difference after the private-equity firms Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, along with the real-estate firm Vornado Realty Trust, took over Toys “R” Us in 2005. “It changed the dynamic of how the store ran,” she said. The company eliminated positions, loading responsibilities onto other workers. Schedules became unpredictable. Employees had to pay more for fewer benefits, Reinhart recalled….

Saddled with its new debt…, Toys “R” Us had less flexibility to innovate. By 2007, according to Bloomberg, interest expense consumed 97 percent of the company’s operating profit. It had few resources left to upgrade its stores in order to compete with Target, or to spiff up its website in order to contend with Amazon. “It’s true that they couldn’t respond to Amazon,” Eileen Appelbaum, a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me. “But you have to ask yourself why.”^[82]

KKR and Bain also sold off all of Toys R Us’s real estate assets and forced it to lease them back^[83] (the same strategy private equity vultures employed with Olive Garden, as we will see below).

Sears, likewise, was “a prime example of how hedge funds and private-equity companies take over retailers, encumber them with debt in order to pay themselves massive windfall profits, and then leave the retailer without adequate operating capital to compete.” In 2005, hedge fund manager Edward Lampert bought Sears, merged it with Kmart, loaded them with debt, “and used some of the debt on stock buybacks to pump up the share price and enrich shareholders, notably himself and his hedge fund.” Under this debt load, Sears laid off tens of thousands of workers and its revenue fell by half. Finally, despite repeatedly selling off operating assets to stay solvent, it went under.^[84]

Both human workers and the animals for sale at PetSmart exist under absolutely squalid conditions because of the imperatives of private equity.

It had somehow never occurred to me how much of the average PetSmart worker’s job involves managing the corpses of dead animals. Some of them show up dead on arrival; some die in the backroom sick area if managers consider them too visibly ill to sell; some die on the showroom floor of infectious diseases transmitted through filthy cages; some die of malnutrition, caused by budget cuts or when the company fails to schedule a staffer for feeding duty; some die of heatstroke and hypothermia during power outages that stretch as long as a week because PetSmart is too cheap to equip stores with backup generators; and some even die from the neglect of undertrained $9-an-hour pet sitters and groomers — though most of those workers love animals so much they are willing to sign neo-feudal “training repayment” contracts that force them to pay PetSmart thousands of dollars if they don’t last two years in the job.

But however they die, the animals tend to go slowly, because not only do PetSmart’s owners not deem unsold guinea pigs or bearded dragons worthy of care at the veterinary hospitals conveniently housed in roughly half their 1,500 stores, they do not deem them worthy of euthanasia. And when their tiny organs finally capitulate, their bodies are also not deemed worthy of incineration. A half dozen current and former PetSmart employees told Vice News their freezers regularly overflowed with dead animals, and managers would periodically order cashiers and groomers to dispose of them on their own time, between shifts, in random dumpsters or whatever, in violation of an official PetSmart policy requiring the bodies to be transferred weekly to a veterinary crematorium.

Despite soaring profit margins, PetSmart can’t afford to provide humane environments for either workers or animals. Why? Because of the way — standard for private equity acquisitions — in which it was acquired. The cost of acquisition, $30 billion, was loaded onto PetSmart as debt; that means that, from the get-go, a productive and profitable enterprise was saddled with a mountain of debt by stripping it of everything that made it productive and profitable. Or as Maureen Tkacic put it,

its owners had legally stolen $30 billion from the balance sheet, buying the company with a minuscule down payment, siphoning off cash and assets into its own pockets, and forcing the retailer to submit to a punishing payback plan that sucks every last penny the stores generate into usurious interest payments.^[85]

Starboard Value (“a hedge fund that specialized in buying out and killing off companies, pocketing billions while destroying profitable businesses”), which bought out first Red Lobster and then Olive Garden, pursued the same strategy.

Starboard Value’s game was straightforward: buy a business, load it with debt, sell off its physical plant – the buildings it did business out of – pay itself, and then have the business lease back the buildings, bleeding out money until it collapsed.^[86]

“Real estate separation,” one facet of Starboard’s larger asset-stripping agenda, is a common practice among asset managers.

Darden, owner of LongHorn Steakhouse, Capital Grille and other chains [as well as Olive Garden], “has the largest real estate portfolio in the casual dining industry, owning both the land and buildings on nearly 600 stores and the buildings on another 670,” Starboard Value writes. “We believe that a real estate separation could create approximately $1 billion in shareholder value.”…

This is a more common technique than you might realize. Private equity firms often buy businesses with lots of real estate assets, like nursing homes, restaurants or retail outlets. They then split the company in two: one owns all the real estate, and one manages the rest of the business. The operating company now has to lease back the real estate from the property company, paying rent on what it used to own. The private equity firm, meanwhile, can take profits from the lease payments or by selling the entire real estate portfolio, making back its initial investment. The more expensive the leases, the more the private equity firm makes….

If Olive Garden has to cut its earnings in half to pay rent on properties it previously owned, you can forget about upgrading the menu or making any of the other improvements Starboard Value suggests. The restaurants will barely be able to keep afloat. But Olive Garden’s continued existence is of minimal importance to Starboard Value. “These are shareholders, they don’t really care what happens once they make their money,” said Eileen Appelbaum [coauthor of a book on private equity].^[87]

Private equity bears a major share of blame for America’s godawful healthcare system.

PE’s most ghastly impact is felt in the health care sector. Whole towns’ worth of emergency rooms, family practices, labs and other health firms have been scooped up by PE, which has spent more than $1t since 2012 on health acquisitions….

Once a health care company is owned by PE, it is significantly more likely to commit medicare fraud. It also cuts wages and staffing for doctors and nurses. PE-owned facilities do more unnecessary and often dangerous procedures. Appointments get shorter. The companies get embroiled in kickback scandals.^[88]

The effects of asset management firms’ buyouts of nursing homes on residents’ quality of life are even more horrifying.

The Carlyle Group wanted to pay its investors a billion-dollar dividend, so it pawned the real estate holdings of a nursing home chain, forcing it to cough up a half-billion-dollar yearly rent check, which was managed through savage staffing cuts that likely condemned thousands of elderly Americans to die slowly of dehydration, gangrenous bedsores, and preventable falls even before COVID-19 killed a quarter-million residents nationwide. KKR wanted to extract its own payday from a chain of group homes for developmentally disabled adults that had already been sucked dry by a Canadian private equity firm, so it slashed pay to $8 an hour and told workers that it would have them arrested for patient abandonment if they attempted to leave “early” from open-ended “shifts” that lasted as long as 36 hours. On five separate occasions, Texas health inspectors visited KKR’s facilities to find no staff at all. In a single August 2020 day at one West Virginia group home, three of eight unsupervised residents very nearly killed themselves; the unnamed soul who drank antifreeze and was not hospitalized for nine hours damaged his organs permanently.^[89]

We can also thank private equity’s deferred maintenance and milking of the railroad system for the constant stories of derailment and chemical spills, as well as strikes by workers who get no sick days.

The pandemic has seen massive failures in rail service – late deliveries, waves of derailments, huge backlogs. But rail profits have soared, as have the prices of carrying freight. No wonder: in 1980, there were 40 US “Class I” railroads. Today, there are seven….

Today, the remaining Big Railroad companies have divided up the country into noncompeting territories. Two companies – CSX and Norfolk Southern – dominate the east-of-Chicago trade. West of Chicago, there’s another duopoly run by Union Pacific and BNSF. North-south rail is controlled by three companies. Most train stations have only one railroad servicing them.

The railroads haven’t just hiked their rate-cards, they’ve also hiked their hidden fees, doubling their revenues from “demurrage and accessorial” fees – these are the rail equivalent of airline baggage upcharges.

But most of all, railroads have implemented “Precision Scheduled Railroading” (PSR), a just-in-time system that saw mass closures of freight facilities and huge staff reductions – since deregulation the rail industry went from 500,000 jobs to 130,000 jobs. Much of these staff reductions involved closing union shops and replacing well-paid workers with low-paid workers who have fewer on-the-job rights.

…Right from the start, PSR created shipping delays and losses. Railyard accidents shot up, and with them, worker fatalities. Derailments soared. People died….

The number of usable track-miles in America plummeted. Productivity – driven by layoffs and service cuts – leveled off when there weren’t any workers or routes left to cut.

…Today, the American rail system has been cut to the bone, and it represents one of the weak links in the US supply chain. The system experiences bottlenecks at every point: loading, unloading, delivery – not to mention all the cargo that disappears overboard when the trains derail while traversing under-maintained tracks.^[90]

Railroad workers have warned that staffing cuts, and deferment or skimping on maintenance, will inevitably result in disaster.

According to interviews with current and former rail workers, union officials, and independent experts, the Hyndman derailment and others like it are the all-too-predictable result of nearly all the major freight rail companies adopting a business approach called Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). Proponents of PSR say it is about leveraging modern technology to improve efficiency. But those who work on the railroads every day say it is little more than a euphemism for draconian cost-cutting in order to achieve an arbitrary metric that pleases shareholders. That metric, called an “operating ratio,” must get below 60 percent, which means only 60 percent of every dollar earned goes towards actually running the railroads. The rest can go towards executive pay and shareholder dividends. All but one of the seven so-called “Class I” railroad companies, which account for 94 percent of the freight rail industry’s revenue, have explicitly adopted some form of PSR….

Increasingly, railroads are choosing to boost profits and pay shareholders rather than invest in safety. In interviews with Motherboard, workers said that since their respective companies adopted PSR, they barely recognize the work that they do. All of their priorities have changed. What used to be about safety is now about cutting costs. Among the changes:

• Workers now have to inspect many multiples more rail cars in a fraction of the time, barely giving them enough time to walk the entire train…
• Shops and yards that used to perform inspections along routes have been closed, meaning there are fewer inspection points…
• Maintenance is deferred as long as possible
• Knowledgeable and safety-conscious supervisors have often been replaced by businessmen who cultivate a culture of fear and intimidation around reporting unsafe equipment; doing so would keep the train in the yard longer, hurting the metrics on which supervisors are graded
• While there are strict federal rules governing how often the people running the trains must rest so as to minimize accidents, the workers performing safety-critical inspections have been pushed to compensate for mass layoffs by working 16 hours per shift or more, discouraged from taking lunch breaks, and sometimes required to work overtime or risk losing their jobs

One 40-year veteran railroad worker told Motherboard he has never seen anything like it. “They’re just cutting everywhere, on both ends of everything.”…

[Anonymous Norfolk Southern workers] said these cuts have resulted in a dramatic personnel shortage, and since none of the company’s efficiency metrics measure safety, supervisors and workers are placed in the thankless position of either sacrificing safety in order to hit the numbers or do the responsible thing and risk getting punished.

Across the different crafts, workers highlighted the same general problem: in the push for efficiency, fewer workers are being tasked with more, rushed through safety-critical inspections and repairs, and are pressured not to report defects or potential safety issues that will take cars out of service and require manpower to fix.^[91]

The parasitic and destructive nature of the rentier economy holds equally true in real estate. Purchases of residential real estate by asset management firms exploded after the 2008 crash, snatching up devalued properties by the gross.

“Large private equity firms accounted for 85% of Freddie Mac’s 20 biggest deals financing apartment complex purchases by a single borrower,” according to Heather Vogell.

Private equity is now the dominant form of financial backing among the 35 largest owners of multifamily buildings, the analysis showed. In 2011, about a third of the apartment units held by the top owners were backed by private equity. A decade later, half of them were.

Private equity firms are among the worst offenders among landlords, in terms both of evictions and jacking up rents.^[92]

Deferred maintenance and “slumlord” conditions  are typical in apartment complexes acquired by asset-management firms.^[93] “We would be told for weeks on end that requests for repairs were awaiting corporate approval,” according to one resident of the Olume apartments in San Francisco after Greystar bought them out. The owners’ response to complaints of broken appliances was straight out of Brazil:

When Titus’ refrigerator and, later, her washing machine broke, she said building staff simply scavenged replacements from other apartments instead of getting the broken ones fixed or buying new ones. The shuffling was so extensive that when she had a problem with a replacement refrigerator and staff brought yet another one to her unit, she peered inside to find labels she had affixed there herself, months before. She realized staff had given her back her original appliance. It still leaked, she noted.^[94]

The same is true across the board, including single-family homes as well.

Private equity is behind the mass rollup of single-family homes across America. Wall Street landlords are the worst landlords in America, who load up your rent with junk fees, leave your home in a state of dangerous disrepair, and evict you at the drop of a hat….

As these houses decay through neglect, private equity makes a bundle from tenants and even more borrowing against the houses. In a few short years, much of America’s desperately undersupplied housing stock will be beyond repair. It’s a bust out.^[95]

And as one might expect, trailer park residents get more than their share of exploitation by private equity. Predatory investors

see the parks as reliable sources of passive income — assets that generate steady returns and require little effort to maintain. Several of the world’s largest investment-services firms, such as the Blackstone Group, Apollo Global Management, and Stockbridge Capital Group, or the funds that they manage, have spent billions of dollars to buy mobile-home communities from independent owners….  In 2013, the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm that’s now worth two hundred and forty-six billion dollars, began buying mobile-home parks, first in Florida and later in California, focussing [sic] on areas where technology companies had pushed up the cost of living. In 2016, Brookfield Asset Management, a Toronto-based real-estate investment conglomerate, acquired a hundred and thirty-five communities in thirteen states.

As with other forms of real estate, an early sign of acquisition by private equity is “a dramatic spike in lot rent.”

Once a home is stationed on a lot, it is not always possible to move it; if it is possible, doing so can cost as much as ten thousand dollars…. “The vulnerability of these residents is part of the business model,” Sullivan said. “This is a captive class of tenant.” A leader of an association for mobile-home owners in Washington State has compared life in a mobile-home park to “a feudal system.”

…According to Jim Baker, the executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a think tank that monitors the effects of private-equity firms’ investments, extracting profits by increasing lot rents and decreasing expenditure on upkeep is common.^[96]

In some cases, the layers of shell ownership are so deep that tenants don’t even know who their landlord is.

However, the tenant and their supporters had one big problem: they didn’t know where the landlord was. All of the rent checks had been made out to a limited liability company (LLC) and sent to a retail-store mailbox.

“We went to Mail Boxes Etc, because we didn’t actually know where the landlord’s office was, or where they worked, or who he was,” Gallagher said. “That really struck me. There’s this group that owes a lot of accountability, and we have no idea who they are and no way of holding them accountable.”…

By 2015, the number of LLC landlords had risen to nearly 15% of rental owners, up from 8% in 1991. And the more units a landlord had, the likelier their use of LLC-like entities; when a landlord owned between five and 24 units, the likelihood of them being individually named owners was 35% in 2015, down from 65% in 2000. Meanwhile, a 2015 investigation of US real estate purchases found that “nearly half the residential purchases of over $5m were made by shell companies rather than named people”.^[97]

Private equity predation is by no means limited to the acquisition of large corporations. So-called “rollups” — the purchase of numerous small entities in a local or regional market — can be equally lucrative, but with the added advantage of not triggering antitrust scrutiny. A private equity corporation can buy up most of the emergency rooms, ambulance services, youth addiction centers, nursing homes, newspapers, funeral homes, etc., in a given market, and acquire local monopoly pricing power. For example Service Corporation International (SCI) has bought up hundreds of funeral homes, and takes advantage of the reluctance of bereaved families to travel long distances shopping for funeral services by charging 42% more than independent funeral homes on average.^[98]

If the ideal target for rent extraction is a captive consumer with nowhere else to go, then investors in the private prison racket — and even more so in private auxiliary services for public prisons — have hit the motherlode.

Private equity firms have nearly monopolized the market in areas like prison telecommunications. They control huge swaths of vital services like prison health care and food service. The lack of oversight around private equity, combined with the sector’s predatory tactics, has created a nightmare for captive prison populations, whose most basic needs are subjected to the whims of investors.

Private equity, for example, owns around 90% of prison telecommunications — 80% of that going to two firms.

Fee-gouging practices include charging prisoners 3 to 5 cents per minute to read e-readers, similar exorbitant charges to make phone calls to their families, and 25 cent “stamp” charges to send or receive an email. Keep in mind that prisoners are paying these fees with the wages from prison work that pays pennies an hour.^[99]

And again, this isn’t just limited to private prison corporations. Public prison systems are rife with corrupt private contractors.

…the market for privatized services dwarfs that of privatized facilities. The private-prison industry’s annual revenues total $4 billion. By comparison, the correctional food-service industry alone provides the equivalent of $4 billion worth of food each year, according to Technomic, a food industry research and consulting firm. Corrections departments spend at least $12.3 billion on health care, about half of which is provided by private companies. Telephone companies, which can charge up to $25 for a 15-minute call, rake in $1.3 billion annually. The range of for-profit services is extensive, from transport vans to halfway houses, from video visitations to e-mail [sic], from ankle monitors to care packages. To many companies, the roughly $80 billion that the United States spends on corrections each year is not a national embarrassment but a gold mine.^[100]

Ironically, much of the “cost savings” from asset-stripping and downsizing of production workers, in firms acquired by asset management corporations, is simply used to subsidize the proliferation of what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” in the white collar stratum.

Where did the profits from this increased productivity go? Well, much of it, as we are often reminded, ended up swelling the fortunes of the wealthiest 1 percent: investors, executives, and the upper echelons of the professional-managerial classes…. [But a]nother considerable chunk of the benefits of increased productivity went to creating entirely new and basically pointless professional-managerial positions, usually — as we’ve seen in the case of universities — accompanied by small armies of equally pointless administrative staff. As we have seen so often, first the staff is allocated and then someone has to figure out what, if anything, they will actually do.^[101]

Management downsizing in the 80s and 90s was largely a myth. In fact, the proportion of employees in supervisory positions has grown, along with the proportion of total compensation going to management salaries. As David M. Gordon observed in 1996, average pay for production workers had risen from $6.40 (in constant 1994 dollars) in 1948 to $10.50 in 1972. They stayed stagnant afterward, despite the fact that per capita GDP in constant dollars was 53% higher in 1992 than in 1972. Meanwhile, despite the conventional view to the contrary, the proportion of managers and supervisors actually grew during the 1990s. Executive, administrative, and managerial employees in private, nonfarm employment rose from 12.6% to 13.2% of the labor force. Still worse, from 1973 to 1993, management salaries rose from 28.6% to 41.1% of total employee compensation.^[102] The difference would have been enough to increase the hourly pay of production workers by almost 25%.

This tendency — toward not only bullshit jobs but bullshit capital expenditures as well — is reinforced by the standard rules of management accounting. Under the corporate accounting rules pioneered by Donaldson Brown at DuPont, and then introduced at General Motors — the basis for GAAP accounting rules — production labor is the only thing counted as a direct cost. Overhead from management salaries and capital expenditures is treated as indirect cost. What’s more, such overhead is treated, by definition, as the creation of value; through the practice of “overhead absorption,” it is incorporated into the internal transfer price of goods which are “sold to inventory,” and hence increases the total value on paper of unsold assets sitting in the warehouse. So management and management consultants obsessively look for ways to shave another few seconds off of direct labor costs — straining at a gnat — while they swallow the camel of bloated administrative costs and wasteful capital expenditures.^[103]

Enterprises characterized by high levels of rent extraction, and flush with income from the same, tend to display conspicuous waste in areas not directly associated with production. To quote Graeber:

As a general principle, I would propose the following: in any political-economic system based on appropriation and distribution of goods, rather than on actually making, moving, or maintaining them, and therefore, where a substantial portion of the population is engaged in funneling resources up and down the system, that portion of the population will tend to organize itself into an elaborately ranked hierarchy of multiple tiers (at least three, and sometimes ten, twelve, or even more). As a corollary, I would add that within those hierarchies, the line between retainers and subordinates will often become blurred, since obeisance to superiors is often a key part of the job description. Most of the important players are lords and vassals at the same time.^[104]

The financialization of manufacturing industry dovetails with oligopoly market structure and administered pricing, to cause not only the gutting of productive assets and the proliferation of white collar bureaucracy, but also drastically reducing the incentive for technological progress.

Graeber attributed the shift in the 1970s from research and development into technologies, like labor-saving appliances, that increased the average person’s quality of life (technologies “associated with the possibility of alternative futures” like the post-scarcity utopias portrayed in popular fiction), to technologies “that furthered labor discipline and control,”^[105] to a change in the nature of capitalism.

For one thing, capitalist elites may have been coming to the same conclusion as Marx — that continued mechanization of labor and growing capital-intensiveness of production would result in a falling rate of profit.^[106] This becomes especially plausible, when we consider the fact that the generational process of rebuilding the European and East Asian plant and equipment destroyed in WWII was nearing its completion around 1970; the 70s were a time of reassessment by political and economic elites that resulted in the replacement of the New Deal social compact with the neoliberal consensus that has dominated ever since.

This neoliberal shift was accompanied by a major change in corporate governance and increased extractiveness of corporate business models.

Executives, whose compensation now increasingly took the form of stock options, began not just paying the profits to investors in dividends, but using money that would otherwise be directed towards raises, hiring, or research budgets on stock buybacks, raising the values of the executives’ portfolios but doing nothing to further productivity.^[107]

Marx and Engels, Graeber notes, were correct to predict that mechanized industrial production, if it continued long enough, would lead to the end of capitalism as a result of the falling rate of profit. But

they were wrong to predict that market competition would compel factory owners to go on with mechanization anyway. If it didn’t happen, it can only be because market competition is not, in fact, as essential to the nature of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else, the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large semi-monopolistic enterprises, would presumably have come as a complete surprise to them.^[108]

The hollowing out and enshittification of private corporations, under the regime of financialization and private equity, eventually reaches a tipping point at which it becomes hegemonic for all organizations — at which point it spreads to nonprofit and public organizations as well.

Consider, for example, the organizational transformation of both public and private universities. Over the past generation, universities have experienced an explosion of administrative staff, even as they’ve replaced most tenured faculty with a precaritous workforce of underpaid adjuncts in the name of “cost-cutting.”

Julie Chernov Hwang, a political science professor at Goucher College, describes the situation in a Twitter thread:

Do you want to know why college tuition has become so expensive?

No, not faculty salaries. Those have largely stagnated.

Fancy dorms & rec centers? Yes. Partially.

But another major cause you may not have considered? The massive expansion of upper tier administration.

When I entered academia 17 years ago, the upper ranks of administrators consisted of a HANDFUL of deans, VPs, directors, & a provost. Now, we have exponentially more Deans, VPs & Directors, as well as EVPs, Associate Deans, & Deputy Provosts w/more being hired each year!

It’s not the middle & lower ranks of administration that are causing the problem. These ranks are hollowed out vis-a-vis a decade ago b/c “staff” are underpaid & overworked &, thus, don’t last long. It’s certainly not the lone soul heading a DEI center.

When politicians criticize cost of college tuition & fees, they need to request org charts to see how admin bloat has increased from a decade, 2 decades ago & ask why. And then, call for cuts HERE, where there is actual bloat- not in departments that are already too lean.

Ask why there are 3 IT directors, but only 2 professional staff at the IT Helpdesk for an entire college. Ask [why] are there 4 Deputy Provosts whereas a decade ago there were none. When we examine rising costs of higher end, this is one variable no one can afford to ignore.^[109]

In reply Gourjoine Wade, Vice President for Student Affairs at Texas Lutheran University, stated the orthodox managerialist position: Chernov Hwang’s critique was “way off base…. One also has to consider that in order to recruit and retain top talent to do the strategic work of leading the many aspects of an institution, campuses must be competitive in salary…”^[110]

But his talking points in no way addressed her point. In fact they begged the question as to whether these new administrative positions actually did anything of value. The need for “competitive salaries” is irrelevant in cases where the positions being filled are themselves the result of administrative bloat/featherbedding. It also doesn’t address the extent to which those “strategic aspects of leading” are what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” and reflect the dysfunctional common institutional culture of universities and large corporations. And even stipulating that necessary positions must pay “competitive salaries,” that just ignores the extent to which the standard salary for a given position reflects the pathological institutional culture of the industry as a whole.

Privatization. The same is true of public infrastructures and services which are privatized. To begin with, as noted by Colin Crouch, so-called “privatization” typically privatizes nothing but profit: “privatisation rarely, outsourcing almost never, results in true markets of the kind envisaged by neoclassical theory.”^[111]

Far from functioning in a competitive market of any kind, “privatized” state infrastructures and services typically continue to function within a web of state protections and subsidies without which they would not be viable. Nicholas Hildyard writes:

While the privatisation of state industries and assets has certainly cut down the direct involvement of the state in the production and distribution of many goods and services, the process has been accompanied by new state regulations, subsidies and institutions aimed at introducing and entrenching a “favourable environment” for the newly-privatised industries.^[112]

Most privatized infrastructures, as well as deregulated utilities, are natural monopolies. “Writing in 1968, Richard Posner defined a situation of natural monopoly as one in which ‘the entire demand within a relevant market can be satisfied at lowest cost by one firm rather than by two or more’.” In such cases, it would be inordinately costly to create multiple parallel competing physical infrastructures — water lines, electrical transmission lines, etc. — serving a given area.^[113] And the incentive to asset strip and starve an enterprise of maintenance and other capital investment is only intensified in the case of infrastructures which are natural monopolies. “Then there is the fact that most utility businesses are natural monopolies. Why incur the expense of physically upgrading, say, a gas distribution network if dissatisfied customers cannot switch to a different network?”^[114] This should resonate with anyone who has experienced the bandwidth throttling of the typical Internet service, or who gets their lead-tainted water from a privatized utility.

Whatever “competition” is introduced into the supply of public services, either by privatizing a state-owned infrastructure or utility, or “deregulating” a regulated public utility, is almost entirely a mirage. The physical infrastructure, which is a natural monopoly, continues to be owned by one firm. The “competing” firms in the utility “market” are little more than billing services with a letterhead and post office box. In a 2003 article at Mises.org, which has since been memory holed, Tim Swanson described how the “deregulation” of a regulated utility monopoly actually works:

…[I]n the mid-90s, regulators, consumers and energy producers began to rearrange the market for “deregulation” in Texas. Incumbent providers such as TXU and Reliant were restructured in the name of free markets, but when the dust cleared, the only winners were members of the political class and corporations that had been State-sanctioned monopolies prior to the “deregulation.”

TXU was separated into two companies, Oncor and TXU Energy. Oncor was given the monopoly on all services including meter reading, energy delivery, etc. Additionally they own all of the poles and wires and are protected by law from competition. TXU Energy became a billing company (and owner of power plants), merely forwarding all of the customer service questions and problems to Oncor, and therefore providing no services themselves.

This is akin to the following: splitting AT&T into two separate companies, one (Nexis) that owns all of the cables, wires, PBXs, switching stations, call centers, etc. and provides all of the services, repairs, installations, etc., and the other company (Willy) whom [sic] simply sends you a bill at the end of the month, providing no value-added service.

Not only is it not deregulation (the same players exist with State protection) but more overhead is created through the creation of another billing company.^[115]

The same is true of privatized infrastructures. To quote Crouch again: “Making markets or analogues of them where they do not really exist requires some intellectual acrobatics from regulators.”

An interesting example is found in gas and electricity supply. It is difficult for domestic customers to see themselves as being in a market here. Whichever supplier they have, the same gas and electrical power come to their pipes and cables. There is no variety of product or quality that enables consumers to exercise the kind of choice they have in normal markets. They also sign up to contracts lasting at least a year, and often of unlimited term, so these markets are not very active. Suppliers compete with each other by trying to develop better forward purchasing strategies and superior advertisements. While a few small suppliers may gain some market entry, an illusion of diversity is produced by third-party firms — typically well-known supermarket brands — doing deals for their customers by buying energy from the primary suppliers, badging it, and selling it on.^[116]

In any case, it is virtually impossible to create a competitive market within which a privatized or deregulated infrastructure or service can be disciplined by genuine market forces. In the case of outsourced public services, “a public authority becomes the customer, and only supply is privatised.”

The end users are not customers, just users, and therefore not part of the market relationship. Any rights they have remain those of citizens, as they had under the previous public regime — though in practice these may be attenuated by aspects of the contract between public authority and provider, such as commercial confidentiality clauses that give citizens less information about the details of a service than they had with a public supplier.^[117]

Similarly, outsourcing health services and schools to private and other providers has usually meant dismantling consultation mechanisms, local users’ watchdog committees and other forms of participative governance. Critics have protested that such moves contradict the promise of greater responsiveness to users that had been proclaimed to be a necessary consequence of moving closer to the market. But the owners of the firms providing health and educational services fear that consultation mechanisms will threaten their profitability, formal customer participation mechanisms being virtually unknown in the private sector.^[118]

Privatized public infrastructures, especially natural monopolies like public utilities and transportation infrastructures, are extremely attractive investments for the financial sector. They combine high market entry barriers, pricing power, and a captive customer base.^[119] In short, they are a guaranteed source of exploitative profits.

De-risking, Crouch argues — removing any risk, and providing a guaranteed return, to the private “partner” in the “private-public partnership” — is a central consideration both in the state’s privatization or outsourcing policies, and in the business strategy of the private corporations that take advantage of it.

States have been the principal owners of major infrastructure goods, like roads, and also of the physical infrastructure of public services, like hospitals. A further major motive for partial privatisation has been a desire by governments to attract private investment to such projects, saving on the taxation burden involved in state funding in exchange for having private firms own parts of national infrastructure. This has severe limits. If projects are undertaken for collective goods or citizenship purposes, they are likely to be less profitable than those undertaken on assessments of pure profitability. Firms therefore have to be offered inducements to create this new market. Also, the economic risk of failure that attends private ventures, and which is in theory the raison d’être of the capitalist concept of profit, is difficult to translate into the political risk of failure with a collective or citizenship good. Indeed, as already noted, the response to the financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated that, if a risk includes that of system failure, states may feel impelled to absolve investors from the risks that in theory justify their private sector profits.

As a result, recourse to the private sector for public investment has usually not absolved governments from ultimate responsibility for risk, but rather has required them to offer indemnity to private investors in the case of failure. It has therefore not used the market in one of its most basic meanings. The offer in the UK of higher subsidies to private railway undertakings than were made available to the railways when publicly owned is a case in point. Another concerns public – private investment partnerships (PPP), known in the UK as the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Under PFI, a firm invests in building or reconstructing a school, hospital or similar facility for a public authority, and then leases it back to the authority for a period of years. The authority acquires a facility that it would not otherwise have afforded for several years, but has to pay back a much larger sum over the lease period. Also, guarantees have to be given to the firm that there will be no substantial changes in use, which can threaten the efficiency of the authority’s operation. Perhaps most important, in the wake of the financial crisis, the UK government had to promise to underwrite PFI contracts. The state did not divest itself of risk.^[120]

In the Global North, Christophers writes, “governments have successfully, if unevenly, de-risked private-sector infrastructure investment – and… the capital has correspondingly flowed in, not least via asset managers’ bulging infrastructure funds.”

In 2016, the UK’s Infrastructure and Projects Authority crowed that Moody’s had awarded the country’s regulatory regimes for the water, gas and electricity sectors the highest possible score (AAA) – representing the lowest investment risk. Moody’s judged those regimes as ‘amongst the most stable and predictable in the world’: an infrastructure investor’s ‘paradise’, as the Financial Times subsequently remarked.

Motivated by concerns about growing infrastructure gaps, this burgeoning enterprise of state-led de-risking… substantially [explains] the conspicuous growth in real-asset investment via asset managers in the period since the financial crisis.^[121]

De-risking is even more of a racket in the Global South. The United Nations Development Programme, World Bank, and G20 are all strident advocates of the position that “attracting external private finance requires wholesale de-risking.”^[122]

De-risking of infrastructure investment comes in many guises, and has been initiated by a range of different actors. Two of the main categories of risk that it aims to mitigate are construction and demand risk. The former is the risk that a project costs more or takes longer to complete than projected, or that construction to the required standard is simply unsuccessful; the latter is the risk that, once built, a project does not generate the level of revenue anticipated. Governments in the Global South have increasingly sought to offset both sets of risks for international private investors, for instance, in the case of power-generation facilities, by guaranteeing revenue via long-term power-purchase contracts with state-owned utilities. Multilateral institutions have also helped with de-risking. In 2013, for example, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a sister organisation of the World Bank, initiated a programme designed to steer institutional-investor capital into Global South infrastructure projects. Not only would the IFC co-invest; it would, if its private-sector co-investors incurred losses, absorb some of those losses.^[123]

Hildyard’s Licensed Larceny is an in-depth study of the “privatization” and “public-private partnership” rackets in action, in the Global South. For global finance capital, the goal of investment in privatized or contracted-out infrastructures is guaranteed, “stable, contracted income streams.”^[124] For Western financiers and asset managers, infrastructures are a class of assets with “stable, contracted cash flow for the long term.” Without a contract to protect against “market-exposure to price,” there will be no takers.^[125]

To add insult to injury, the primary function of such infrastructures in the Global South is to serve the needs of exported Western capital and offshored production; they are the infrastructures without which corporate globalization and global supply chains could not exist. So countries are tying down an enormous share of their future revenue to guarantee exorbitant rates of profit to Western capital (“legally enforceable liens on future public flows of money”) — in order to construct infrastructure whose primary purpose is to facilitate the extraction of value from their countries by that same Western capital.^[126] A number of equally toxic trends — the increasing centrality of long-distance transportation infrastructures to the profitability of global capitalism; the “fiscal crisis of the state” induced by the increasing cost of providing the prerequisites for the profitability of capital; and the increasing financialization of capitalism — all intersect, in bringing about this trend.

…[I]nfrastructure-as-asset-class is more than just a rent-grab by finance or an opportunity for derivatives traders to make a quick buck by constructing a superstructure of complex financial trades on the back of state-backed guarantees — though it is certainly both of these things. Its emergence is also an outcome of deeper structural forces that have their roots in a centuries-long trend that has massively increased both the scale and the costs of the physical infrastructure — roads, railways, ports, airports, waterways, energy facilities and the like — that dominant forms of industrial capital need in order to expand.^[127]

Globalized capital absolutely depends, for its profitability, on constructing “a global network of interconnected infrastructure corridors, logistics hubs and new cities aimed at speeding up the circulation of commodities between sites of resource extraction, production and consumption.”^[128]

For all the talk of providing poorer people with access to clean water or electricity, the planned (or already initiated) programs are primarily directed at reducing ‘economic distance’, thereby unlocking remote mineral deposits and expanding the export of cheap agricultural produce; better harnessing landlocked countries to the global economy; expanding inland free trade zones and low-wage production centres that have to date been largely restricted to coastal areas; speeding supply chain connections; and improving the linkages between the 44 cities where the bulk of the ‘global consuming class’ are expected to be living by 2025….^[129]

The old saying “Selling you the rope to hang you with” comes to mind.

This list gives some idea of the range of guarantees embedded in such “free market” arrangements, by which investors are protected against the merest whiff of actual market forces:

guaranteed rates of return; minimum guaranteed income streams; guarantees on loans repayments; guarantees against currency exchange rate risks; guaranteed minimum service charge payments, irrespective of the performance of the PPP; and guarantees of compensation should new legislation affect the profitability of their investments.

As for the actual rates of guaranteed annual profit, 15% is at the low end of the range of what’s acceptable.^[130]

So far we haven’t even considered privatization from the delivery-of-service end — from which perspective privatization is a vehicle for large-scale enshittification. Advocates for privatization and public-private partnerships typically argue that they will increase infrastructure investment, improve service, and cut costs. As summarized by Christophers:

First, it said, private ownership maximises infrastructure investment and service quality because public-sector operators ‘are prone to underinvest’ and thereby to create ‘a poor experience for consumers’. Second, private ownership is more reliable, allegedly delivering new infrastructure ‘more often on time and on budget’ than public ownership, and with a lower risk of project cancellation. Third, private ownership is cheaper, both for users of infrastructure (because it entails ‘greater efficiency’ of operation) and for governments choosing between in-sourcing and outsourcing of asset build and operation (because outsourcing ‘results in lower overall life cycle costs’, thus reducing the cost of public procurement). Last, but definitely not least, private ownership… reduces risk to the state and, behind the state, taxpayers, insofar as key risks – ‘design and construction costs, delays, volatile market demand, and operation and maintenance costs’ – are ‘transferred to the private sector’.^[131]

The truth, in every case, is just the opposite. We’ve already seen the ways in which taxpayers assume increased risk, resulting in greater costs, because of the demand for de-risking as a condition for making a deal.

But in addition, private sector administrators of public infrastructures typically hollow out and asset-strip their acquisitions rather than increasing investment in them, reduce service quality, and increase costs.

The usual practice upon acquiring a privatized public property — just as with formerly productive and profitable firms acquired by private equity — is to use it as a cash cow. “Privatized utility providers, cossetted by monopoly conditions, had, according to [Martin] Wolf, been sweating their infrastructure assets rather than improving and upgrading them.”^[132]

[Nigel] Hawkins’s assessment… was perhaps even more damning. ‘Despite some efforts to provide incentives for innovation’, he wrote, ‘the fact remains that R&D expenditure in the electricity, gas and especially the water sector is extremely modest. By way of example, Severn Trent, currently capitalised at almost £5 billion, invested just £5 million in R&D in 2013/14.’ That equated to 0.1 per cent of the company’s value – or 0.3 per cent of its revenues of £1.9 billion in the same year. Meanwhile, Railtrack, the private company that had assumed ownership of the bulk of the fixed railway infrastructure (track, stations, signalling, tunnels, bridges and level crossings) upon the sector’s privatization, was, noted Hawkins, ‘widely believed to have heavily underinvested’ prior to its collapse in 2001. Hawkins also made special mention of the former airport owner and operator BAA plc, a ‘disproportionate part’ of whose investment budget had evidently ‘been directed at providing expensive retail facilities rather than improving airport infrastructure’.^[133]

…Under the ownership of Macquarie bank, which bought it in 2006 and exited a little over a decade later, Thames Water’s financial and operational risk piled up: £2 billion of extra debt was loaded onto the company’s balance sheet, and what one judge described as ‘inadequate investment, diabolical maintenance and poor management’ led to ‘extensive pollution of the Thames, and other rivers, with untreated sewage between 2012 and 2014’.^[134]

Besides asset stripping and hollowing out, there’s rate gouging. Marjorie Kelly: “In the UK since 1989, following privatization of water, water bills for customers climbed by one third. The water industry now boasts 32 percent profit margins.”^[135]

How the Rentier Economy Blocks Innovation. Even in cases where asset managers and other rentiers are not owners of productive industry, the shift towards rent-extraction as an increasing share of profit from productive enterprise intensifies the destruction of value. This is true, in particular, of industries whose profit model is centered on intellectual property.

In fact, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the modern system of IP protection is actually counterproductive – when measured, that is, against the avowed purpose of stimulating innovation. Precisely because rights are now so strong and so well enforced, they encourage instead what is often referred to as ‘rent-seeking’.^[136]

But in fact patents suppress innovation as much as they encourage it. This is because of the “shoulders of giants” effect. Contrary to the popular trope, inventions are almost never the work of a lone genius. Technological innovations are the creation of social intellect. We see multiple variations on inventions like the telephone, radio, internal combustion engine, etc., appearing in numerous places at about the same time, because 1) the technical prerequisites for them are all in existence, and 2) there is a widely perceived need for them. Any new invention presupposes a wide variety of existing technologies that are combined and reworked into a new configuration. Patents on existing technologies may or may not marginally increase the incentives to new invention, but they also increase the cost of doing so by levying a tariff on the aggregation of existing knowledge to serve as building blocks of a new invention.^[137]

According to Marjorie Kelly, “large companies have increasingly used ‘strategic’ patenting to patent around areas with a view to blocking competitors….”

Such strategic patenting can be especially effective when a patent is obtained at an early stage of the development of a technology, before the technical standard is properly determined, or in fast-paced and patent-intensive fields such as ICT or biotech, where innovations are highly interdependent or complementary. An early patent gives its owner the chance of setting the dominant standard and blocking improvements others might make. The risk of infringing the patent can also prevent other firms from marketing their products or services.^[138]

James Watt’s refusal to license his patent on the steam engine, for example, prevented others from improving the design until the patent expired in 1800. This delayed the introduction of locomotives and steamboats.^[139] According to Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine: “Once Watt’s patents were secured and production started, he devoted a substantial portion of his energy to fending off rival inventors.”

…[I]n the 1790s, when the superior Hornblower engine was put into production, Boulton and Watt went after Jonathan Hornblower with the full force of the legal system.

During the period of Watt’s patents, the United Kingdom added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Watt’s patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during the period of Watt’s patent; however between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a factor of five.^[140]

Other people’s patents, ironically, hindered Watt from improving his own steam engine design.

An important limitation of the original Newcomen engine was its inability to deliver a steady rotary motion. The most convenient solution, involving the combined use of the crank and a flywheel, relied on a method patented by James Pickard, which prevented Watt from using it. Watt also made various attempts to efficiently transform reciprocating motion into rotary motion, reaching, apparently, the same solution as Pickard. But the existence of a patent forced him to contrive an alternative, less efficient mechanical device, the “sun and planet” gear. It was only in 1794, after the expiration of Pickard’s patent, that Boulton and Watt adopted the economically and technically superior crank.^[141]

A wide range of developments in computer software — “all the graphical user interfaces; the widgets such as buttons and icons; the compilers, assemblers, linked lists, object-oriented programs, databases, search algorithms, font displays, word processing, and computer languages” — were developed before the introduction of software patents in 1981. Bill Gates — the intellectual property hawk who denounced free and open-source software as “communist” — admitted that, had such innovations been patented, “the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”^[142]

Besides limiting what new technologies other firms can market, patents hinder the research process itself. David Graeber points to the way that the “creeping privatization of research results” has hindered scientific progress. He quotes David Harvie on the old open-source ethos of scientific research:

Convivial competition is where I (or my team) wish to be the first to prove a particular conjecture, to explain a particular phenomenon, to discover a particular species, star or particle, in the same way that if I race my bike against my friend I wish to win. But convivial competition does not exclude cooperation, in that rival researchers (or research teams) will share preliminary results, experience of techniques and so on … Of course, the shared knowledge, accessible through books, articles, computer software and directly, through dialogue with other scientists, forms an intellectual commons.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s idealized description of the scientific community as engaged in a stigmergically coordinated process, in Blue Mars, is similar.

So public, so explicit. And for any given problem in science, the people who were actually out there on the edge making progress constituted a special group, of a few hundred at most— often with a core group of synthesists and innovators that was no more than a dozen people in all the worlds— inventing a new jargon of their dialect to convey their new insights, arguing over results, suggesting new avenues of investigation, giving each other jobs in labs, meeting at conferences specially devoted to the topic— talking to each other, in all the media there were. And there in the labs and the conference bars the work went forward, as a dialogue of people who understood the issues, and did the sheer hard work of experimentation, and of thinking about experiments.

And all this vast articulated structure of a culture stood out in the open sun of day, accessible to anyone who wanted to join, who was willing and able to do the work; there were no secrets, there were no closed shops….^[143]

This model, Graeber observes, no longer holds true — among corporate scientists, for obvious reasons. But even publicly funded universities and research institutes, scholars increasingly “treat their findings as personal property. Less is published. Academic publishers ensure that findings that are published are more difficult to access, further enclosing the intellectual commons.”^[144]

And what innovations do take place are heavily distorted by patent incentives. For example, contrary to the drug industry’s claims that the astronomical prices funded by patents are necessary for funding ground-breaking new research, Pharma actually spends several times more on marketing than on developing new drugs.^[145] And patents direct what “innovation” does take place largely toward trivial alterations that are just sufficient to justify repatenting at minimal outlay on R&D (e.g. “me, too” drugs).^[146] Cory Doctorow calls it “evergreening”: “coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades.”^[147]

Movies, Music, Publishing, and Other Media. Copyright is by far the biggest enabler of enshittification in the media. The media are a prime field for enshittification, because not only are they (like other industries) subject to acquisition and asset-stripping by vulture capitalists, but copyright gives their owners a free hand to degrade or gut them.

Enshittification has been underway in the movie industry for decades. In the film industry from about 1980 on, according to David Graeber, the major studios — previously vertically integrated and under the absolute control of bosses who, while perhaps vulgar and mercenary, at least had a clear sense of purpose and a knowledge of craft — were acquired by global conglomerates whose absentee managers were concerned only with the balance sheet. The result, internally, was the proliferation of bullshit jobs.

The system that eventually emerged was suffused with bullshit on every level. The process of “development” (“development hell;’ as writers prefer to call it) now ensures that each script has to pass through not just one but usually a half dozen clone-like executives with titles such as (Oscar lists some) “Managing Director of International Content and Talent, Executive Managing Director, Executive Vice President for Development, and, my favorite, Executive Creative Vice President for Television:’ Most are armed with MBAs in marketing and finance but know almost nothing about the history or technicalities of film or TV. Their professional lives, like that of Apollonia’s boss, seem to consist almost entirely of writing emails and having ostensibly high-powered lunches with other executives bearing equally elaborate titles. As a result, what was once the fairly straightforward business of pitching and selling a script idea descends into a labyrinthine game of self-marketing that can go on for years before a project is finally approved.^[148]

And as vulture capitalist ownership further intensified, the explosion of managerial bullshit and featherbedding occurred simultaneously with the gutting and precaritization of actual production jobs like writers and actors.

But the enshittification process really took off with the rise of digital communications and the boost it gave to copyright abuse. Movie and television content which, in a competitive industry, would be left on the market so long as it was profitable at all, is taken off the market because it isn’t profitable enough. We see media conglomerates, because of their monopoly rights to content and ability to hold it off the market altogether if it’s seen as insufficiently profitable, not only canceling wildly popular shows but destroying works of entertainment that have already been produced.

The standard justification is “cost-cutting” — eliminating the payment of residuals — or that the property is worth more as a tax write-off than for the revenue it would bring in. It’s more credible to assume that holding even slightly profitable content off the market, which there would be an incentive to make available for the modest returns absent copyright monopolies, becomes profitable under copyright because the copyright holder sees them as competing for an audience with more lucrative properties. The same principle applied to a lesser degree, Boldrin and Levine observe, in the pre-digital era:

Wait a second, you might say, if a small publisher can make money by publishing the old classic for the market niche interested in it, why do you argue that the big publisher will not? Answer: because for the big publisher the old classic is more valuable unpublished than published! The cheap Devil paperback version of a sixty-year-old spy story would, to some degree, reduce demand for the expensive hardback version of a brand-new spy story.^[149]

Deleting content is an industry trend now. HBO Max in 2022 deleted numerous episodes of Sesame Street, along with dozens of other TV shows and movies.^[150] In early June of 2023, Disney purged its lineup of over 100 titles — some of them just produced — in order to write them off on their taxes.^[151] Paramount Plus did the same thing just a few weeks later.^[152]

But if anyone is the human face of media enshittification, it’s David Zaslav — the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, and of Discovery before the merger with Warner Bros. Following the merger he canceled distribution of a number of movies — including Batgirl — that had already been produced, and tossed them down the memory hole as a loss for tax purposes. He also made the utterly brainless decision to rebrand HBOMax — a household name — as “Max,” purged the Max catalog of 87 titles (including Westworld and Space Ghost Coast to Coast), and gutted the management of TCM and sold off a large portion of its film library.^[153] As Jason Bailey describes him (in a GQ article preserved by Internet Archive, after GQ took it down under pressure from stooges of the thin-skinned Zaslav),

there’s a crucial difference between Zaslav and the old-school moguls he’s attempting to emulate: They loved movies, and cared about filmmakers. Zaslav sees movies as “content,” sees filmmakers as “content creators,” and is only interested in maintaining, preserving, and presenting “content” that can make him and his stockholders a quick buck. Anything that doesn’t, he’ll happily gut. He’s closer to Logan Roy than Jack Warner and there is a genuine, understandable fear that his bean-counting represents not just shrugging indifference but outright hostility to cinema and its rich history.

In Pretty Woman, Richard Gere stars as Edward Lewis, a corporate raider who buys companies “that are in financial difficulty” and sells off their pieces. “So it’s sort of like stealing cars and selling them for the parts, right?” asks call girl Vivian (Julia Roberts), when he explains what he does, and it’s hard not to think of Lewis when looking over Zaslav’s reign at Warner Bros Discovery, stepping into the distressed conglomerate and stripping it for parts.

Edward Lewis, however, is at least honest about what he does. “You don’t make anything,” Vivian notes, and he agrees; “You don’t build anything,” she continues, and he concurs with that as well. And perhaps that’s why David Zaslav is earning a concerning reputation so far. He’s out here carrying on like a mogul, but based on his performance to date, he’s only good at breaking things.^[154]

Note well that all this destruction of value is possible only because intellectual property legally prevents anyone else from saving content whose owner wants to memory hole it. Absent copyright, any show or movie removed from one streaming service’s catalog would be immediately snatched up by its competitors, eager to poach subscribers from their rival.

In the music industry, copyright has long enabled record companies to treat artists like garbage.

One trick was to allocate almost all costs to artists and almost all proceeds to themselves. This included charging artists enormous amounts for things like “breakage” and “packaging” (including even on digital files that couldn’t break or be packaged!). Royalties were abysmally low, ][especially for artists who were just starting out. Country star Lyle Lovett once lamented that he “never made a dime” from almost five million records. Toni Braxton sold $170 million worth of records on her first contract, and received a royalty check for just $1,972. Courtney Love broke down the numbers in 2000, showing how on the sale of a million records, a band can easily end up working for minimum wage while the label profits by the millions.

This is largely attributable to a peculiar, longstanding feature of recording contracts — recoupment. Before a penny from a song’s sales actually makes it into their pocket, artists have to recoup not only any advance that was paid upfront but most of the label’s other expenses of making the record. What gets put on artists’ accounts is limited only by the imaginations of their contract’s drafters. Specialist music accountant Craig Williams recounts reviewing one band’s accounting statement to discover “they’d been charged for the champagne, food and taxis home from their own signing party!”

Artists are warned not to sign contracts that give labels a “blank check — like unlimited deductions for travel, hotel stays, car rental, meals and entertainment,” or deductions for the company’s general costs of doing business. But even if they avoid that trap, it’s still usual for them to find themselves on the hook for all recording costs, including paying the producer, production costs, tour costs, marketing costs, and travel, plus all (or at least half) the cost of any videos. To make things worse, musicians are often required to use the label’s internal suppliers or preferred partners for these services, and these suppliers engage in ghastly price gouging, knowing their “customers” have no choice but to pay whatever number appears on the invoice.^[155]

The structure of these deals reveals why it’s so difficult for even “successful” acts to recoup. Consider a 1970s-era group, advanced forty thousand dollars (ten thousand each to keep them going for the two years or so it took to make the record) plus recording and tour costs of $110,000, on a contract with a 5 percent royalty. For every hundred dollars their music brings in, ninety-five goes direct to the label, and five goes toward chipping away at their debt. It’s not until their music has generated three million that the original $150,000 debt will finally be erased, and the band will start to be paid for the first time since they received that initial advance (still, just five dollars for every hundred their music brings in).^[156]

And in music as in other industries, draconian digital copyright laws have enabled intensified exploitation. The smarmy anti-downloading cliché “Creators deserve to be paid” is, in reality, nothing but a self-serving propaganda slogan invented by media corporations — the very entities primarily responsible for seeing that creators do not get paid. A 2018 Techdirt article reported that only 12% of music revenue from listener payments actually went to artists; the rest went to middlemen — i.e. streaming platforms or record labels.^[157]

The music industry’s copyright-maximalist business model is also a great impediment to musical innovation. Music traditionally pursued a folk model, in which artists were inspired by and riffed off of each other’s songs — in other words, what the RIAA calls “theft.” As Jon Caramanica at the New York Times argues,

Occasionally, pop innovates in a hard stylistic jolt, or an outlier comes to rapid prominence…, but more often, it moves as a kind of unconscious collective. An evolutionary step is rarely the product of one person working in isolation; it is one brick added atop hundreds of others.

Originality is a con: Pop music history is the history of near overlap. Ideas rarely emerge in complete isolation. In studios around the world, performers, producers and songwriters are all trying to innovate just one step beyond where music currently is, working from the same component parts. It shouldn’t be a surprise when some of what they come up with sounds similar — and also like what came before.

…Every song benefits from what preceded it, whether it’s a melodic idea, a lyrical motif, a sung rhythm, a drum texture. A forensic analysis of any song would find all sorts of pre-existing DNA.^[158]

It’s reached the point where musical creation is too legally risky, and potentially costly, for an increasing number of small creators. At Rolling Stone, Amy Wang observed:

In the five years since a court ruled that “Blurred Lines” infringed on Marvin Gaye’s 1977 “Got to Give It Up,” demanding that Thicke and Williams fork over $5 million to the Gaye estate for straying too close to the older song’s “vibe,” the once-sleepy realm of music copyright law has turned into a minefield…. Across genres, artists are putting out new music with the same question in the backs of their minds: Will this song get me sued?

Thanks to the “Blurred Lines” ruling, copyright laws — which used to protect only lyrics and melodies — can now be applied to “the far more abstract qualities of rhythm, tempo, and even the general feel of a song,” so that “a song can be sued for feeling like an earlier one.”

Big labels can afford professional musicologists to vet songs for potential liability. Smaller independent artists can’t. The insurance industry has responded with policies that insure musical artists against several million in copyright lawsuit losses. But because these policies can run anywhere from $20 million to $250 million a year, the cost is just another way to lock smaller artists out and deter creativity.^[159]

In publishing, as well, industry consolidation in the hands of fewer and fewer vulture capitalists is accelerating the process of enshittification. Cory Doctorow points out that

publishing’s contraction into a five-company cartel didn’t occur in a vacuum. It was a normal response to monopolization elsewhere in its supply chain. First it was bookselling collapsing into two major chains. Then it was distribution going from 300 companies to three. Today, it’s Amazon, a monopolist with unlimited access to the capital markets and a track record of treating publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle….”^[160]

But the process, already long underway, is picking up further steam thanks to asset management vultures making their first venture into the book publishing industry. This past August, Paramount announced its intent to sell its publishing property, Simon & Schuster, to the notorious private equity firm KKR — the company that sucked all the bodily fluids out of Toys R Us and discarded its shriveled skin.^[161] Carter Dougherty and Andrew Park, at The Atlantic, elaborate on the implications for the publisher:

On its face, the Simon & Schuster acquisition appears to be a standard private-equity deal, which is precisely the problem. Private equity is the anodyne label adopted after “leveraged buyouts” got a bad name, in part thanks to KKR’s ravaging of RJR Nabisco after a $25 billion takeover in 1988. In a leveraged buyout, the buyer takes over a company with a small amount of its own money, a larger amount of investors’ money, and a whole lot of debt. KKR agreed to pay $1.62 billion for Simon & Schuster, of which $1 billion will reportedly be borrowed money.

From the perspective of the private-equity firm, leverage is a feature, not a bug. Purchase a company for $100 million in cash with no debt, make $5 million in profit annually, and it will deliver a return of 5 percent. Buy the same company using 60 percent debt, and that same profit in absolute terms yields a 12.5 percent return.

Crucially, Simon & Schuster, not KKR, is responsible for repaying the debt. KKR simply raises it, against the publisher’s franchise value, to fund the acquisition. Lenders have no recourse to KKR or its executives, who are legally shielded from liability….

Based on terms granted to similarly rated borrowers, and on our analysis of Bloomberg data on recent transactions, Simon & Schuster would have to pay interest rates above 9 percent. That would cost the publisher nearly $100 million, about 40 percent of operating income in 2022, on interest alone. In raw financial terms, the transaction will weaken Simon & Schuster the moment it closes, never mind what KKR does as an owner.

Dan Sinykin, an academic analyst of the publishing industry, anticipates new levels of enshittification as Simon & Schuster responds to cost-cutting imperatives. He predicts that “KKR will double down even more than big publishers already have on proven authors or celebrity memoirs, at the expense of riskier unknown writers…. To a cost-cutter, established brands substitute for expensive marketing.”^[162]

But academic publishing, in particular, is the poster child for enshittification. It’s a textbook model of how rent extraction from intellectual property can approach its theoretical maximum through institutional collusion and exploitation of a captive clientele.

According to Heather Morrison, one academic journal publisher alone — Elsevier — made over $2 billion in profits, or $730 in profit for every article it published.^[163] In 2011 the profit margins of the largest academic journals approached 40%.^[164] Elsevier and the other top three publishers of academic journals, between them, publish 42% of academic articles.^[165] One reason for the high profit margins is that most of the labor involved in producing content — namely, writing and peer-reviewing the articles — is provided for free by academics whose livelihoods are provided by the universities that employ them. At the same time, a major share of revenue comes from online sales, where the primary cost is web hosting and there are no printing or shipping costs.^[166]

George Monbiot accused academic journals of making Rupert Murdoch “look like a socialist”:

You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50.

Of course you could read a print copy at the library, but that would only be pushing the problem off on someone else. Libraries pay an average cost of $3,792 for a year’s subscription to a chemistry journal. You read that correctly; that was supposed to be a four-digit number. And that’s only the average; Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta is $20,930 a year.^[167] Those numbers are from 2011, by the way; since subscription prices for academic journals go up faster than the general inflation rate, university libraries are no doubt nostalgic for them now.

To understand the power position that these companies hold over academic researchers, you have to remember that a particular academic article is a unique good for which there is no adequate substitute. The academic publisher holds a monopoly over a given article, and a scholar who needs it for their research cannot buy it from a competitor. As an antitrust complaint to the EU put it,

publishers do not realistically compete with each other, as all their products are fundamentally unique (i.e., each publisher has a 100% market share for each journal or article), and unequivocally in high demand due to the way scholarly research works. The result of this is that consumers (i.e., research institutions and libraries) have little power to make cost-benefit evaluations to decide whether or not to purchase, and have no choice but to pay whatever price the publishers asks with little transparency over costs, which we believe is a primary factor that has contributed to more than a 300% rise in journal prices above inflation since 1986. Thus, we believe that a functional and competitive market is not currently able to form due to the practices of dominant players, like Elsevier, in this sector.^[168]

It’s true that, in practice, Elsevier’s and other publishers’ monopolies can be circumvented by such expedients as finding preprints on authors’ Academia.edu or Researchgate pages, or pirated copies on Library Genesis or SciHub. But academic publishers are doing their best, obviously, to use the law to shut down such alternatives. And university and library administrators are generally quite compliant with copyright law, and complicit with publishers in forbearing to recommend the illegal alternatives.

As for academic book publishers, anyone who has to buy a new set of college texts every semester will understand that racket from direct experience. Like academic journals, textbook publishers are able to set prices with virtual impunity because they are dealing with a captive clientele. Consider a math professor at Cal State Fullerton, who risked disciplinary action.

His crime? Refusing to teach the assigned textbook, which costs $180 and was co-written by the chair and vice-chair of his academic department. According to the Register, the mathematics department decided way back in 1984 to “approve” the text and hasn’t revisited its decision since. Bourget wanted to use two other textbooks instead — one of which costs $76, and the other of which was free.

“College textbook publishers charge vast and extortionate amounts for their textbooks for one simple reason,” Henry Farrell writes.

They do it because they can. Students usually have to take a few required big courses for their major, and they have to buy the required textbooks for these courses. This means that the market is price insensitive (which is economic jargon for saying that demand doesn’t go down as much as it should when prices go up). Professors often don’t care as much as they should about the costs of the textbooks — after all, they don’t have to pay those costs themselves. Students do usually care, but they don’t have any choice in the matter — they have to buy the textbooks they are required to buy. Businesses can make big, big profits from selling to price-insensitive markets, since they can jack up prices without weakening demand for their product.^[169]

Newspapers are yet another print medium being enshittified by consolidation working together with private equity. Consider Heath Freeman, the hedge fund manager who acquired the Boston Globe in 2018. Bloomberg columnist Joe Nocera, who compares Freeman unfavorably to Gordon Gekko, recounts the track record of Freeman’s fund Alden Global Capital, which now owns 97 papers. Freeman, he says, sees the primary function of the newspapers Alden acquires as providing cash cows for other investments. Alden Global Capital cuts costs by gutting journalistic staff:

…[T]he staff of the Denver Post has fallen from 184 journalists to 99 between 2012 and 2017. The Pottstown Mercury in Pennsylvania went from 73 journalists in 2012 to 19 in 2017. That’s right: 19. The Norristown Times-Herald, also in Pennsylvania, shrank from 45 journalists to 12. The San Jose Mercury News and the Orange County Register, both of which had been dominant papers in their regions before Alden Global bought them, have also been decimated by layoffs….

Can you really cover a metro area of over 2 million people with 66 journalists? Of course not. Although those running his papers claim the cuts are driven by necessity, the layoffs seem far in excess of what’s happening elsewhere in the industry. Instead, it appears that Freeman is cutting costs so he can pull out cash, and then, as the business dwindles because the product is damaged, he cuts some more, pulling out yet more cash while further damaging the product.

“There’s no long-term strategy other than milking and continuing to cut,” the “Newsonomics” writer Ken Doctor told the journalist Julie Reynolds. “Their view is that in 2021, they’ll deal with that then. Whatever remnants are there, they’ll try to find a buyer.” Actually, at the rate Freeman is going, there may not be any remnants by 2021.

And what is Freeman doing with the cash? According to a recent lawsuit, he is siphoning it into some of his hedge fund’s poorly performing investments. Among other things, Alden Global invested $80 million in Homex, “a bankrupt developer charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with committing the biggest real estate fraud in Mexican history,” as Reynolds put it. Most recently, again according to the lawsuit, it plowed $158 million into a failing pharmacy chain, Fred’s Inc.

Indeed, without the ability to bleed his papers dry, one has to wonder whether Freeman would even have a hedge fund at this point.^[170]

The Chicago Tribune, also bought up by Alden, underwent a similar process of asset-stripping.

Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn’t manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the state’s undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter who’d helped expose the governor’s offshore shell companies. When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone.

…Meanwhile, the Tribune’s remaining staff, which had been spread thin even before Alden came along, struggled to perform the newspaper’s most basic functions. After a powerful Illinois state legislator resigned amid bribery allegations, the paper didn’t have a reporter in Springfield to follow the resulting scandal.^[171]

Julie Reynolds describes Alden as “one of the slimiest corporate villains of our time.” Alden’s press subsidiary, Digital First Media, has “eliminated a staggering two out of every three staff positions at its media properties.” And Alden “‘borrowed’ $248.5 million from newspaper workers’ pension funds, and had the newspapers take on $200 million in debt to finance its own investments.”

Furthermore, court records bolstered by additional shoe-leather reporting reveal that the top executives of Alden Global Capital have rewarded themselves with tens of millions of dollars’ worth of prime real estate in Florida and the Hamptons for their personal enjoyment. They have also plowed hundreds of millions of dollars bled from their newspapers into non-journalistic investments across the United States and around the world, many of which are at best ethically questionable.^[172]

Acquisition of newspapers by private equity, predictably, tends to result in the “evisceration of local news.”^[173] After all, local news coverage — the main job of an independent local newspaper — requires dedicated reporters. McNewspaper chains, on the other hand, can run national news duplicated from wire services and commentary and features from the syndicates. Consider the decline in quality at the once-respected independent local newspaper, the Burlington, Iowa Hawk Eye, after it was bought out by Gannett.

These days, most of The Hawk Eye’s articles are ripped from other Gannett-owned Iowa publications, such as The Des Moines Register and the Ames Tribune, written for a readership three hours away. The Opinion section, once an arena for local columnists and letter writers to spar over the merits and morals of riverboat gambling and railroad jobs moving to Topeka, is dominated by syndicated national columnists.^[174]

Online news, including online versions of print publications, hasn’t escaped the enshittification process either. Online news sites have yet to recover from the so-called “pivot to video.” In fact it still continues to drive further enshittification and misallocation of resources, despite having been revealed to be Mark Zuckerberg’s version of the Emperor’s new clothes.

The original impetus behind the pivot to video, unsurprisingly, was a grandiose 2016 strategy by the living embodiment of enshittification: Facebook.

In June 2016, Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s VP for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, spent several minutes of a panel at a Fortune conference talking about how Facebook was witnessing video overtake text.

“We’re seeing a year-on-year decline on text,” Mendelsohn answered. “We’re seeing a massive increase, as I’ve said, on both pictures and video. So I think, yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say: Video, video, video.”…

“The best way to tell stories, in this world where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn continued. “It commands so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually, the trend helps us to digest more of the information, in a quicker way.”

“Five years to all video” wasn’t just Mendelsohn’s line — it came from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. “We’re entering this new golden age of video,” Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News in April 2016. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”^[175]

The influence of Zuckerberg’s video bandwagon went far beyond Facebook. In response to Mendelsohn and Zuckerberg,

advertisers and publishers alike began pouring resources into video, at times firing entire teams of writers to instead hire producers to string together short-form, ”snackable” video content. But just four months later, Facebook disclosed a crucial error. For the past two years, the company admitted in an August 2016 post on its advertising help center page, it had massively overestimated the average viewing time for video ads on its platform.^[176]

Facebook’s pivot had an enormous impact on the decisions of news organizations, which were

grappling with how to allocate editorial staff and what kinds of content creation to prioritize. News publishers’ “pivot to video” was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real for news video too — even if people within those publishers doubted the trend based on their own experiences, and even as research conducted by outside organizations continued to suggest that the video trend was overblown and that news readers preferred text….

…What is clear… is that plenty of news publishers made major editorial decisions and laid off writers based on what they believed to be unstoppable trends that would apply to the news business….^[177]

The response of media organizations, not to put too fine a point on it, was lemming-like.

During the period of purported wrongdoing, from July 2015 to June 2016, journalists and newsroom leaders across the country worked to cover an unprecedented presidential campaign in an information landscape that Facebook was constantly, and erratically, transforming…. As media companies desperately tried to do what Facebook wanted, many made the disastrous decision to “pivot to video,” laying off reporters and editors by the dozen.^[178]

Laura Hazard Owen lists some of the announcements by online media outlets during the pivot to video craze:

— Mic (August 2017): “We made these tough decisions because we believe deeply in our vision to make Mic the leader in visual journalism and we need to focus the company to deliver on our mission.” [Facebook’s Mendelsohn, 2015: “Visual communication allows us to sustain the break-neck pace of modern life in a world where we’re sending nearly four billion emails a day and checking our phones at least four times an hour…We couldn’t handle all this information if an increasingly large part of it wasn’t visual.”]

— Vice (July 2017): “Vice Media is laying off about 2 percent of its 3,000 employees across multiple departments while at the same time the company is looking expand internationally and ramp up video production.”

“Cutting jobs is necessary to put more resources into video production, a Vice spokesman said.”

— MTV News, June 2017: “While we’re proud of the longform editorial work from the past two years, we’re returning the editorial operation to its roots of amplifying the audiences’ voices and shifting resources into short-form video content more in line with young people’s media consumption habits.”

— Fox Sports, June 2017: “We will be shifting our resources and business model away from written content and instead focus on our fans’ growing appetite for premium video across all platforms.”

— Vocativ, June 2017: “We’ve seen a shift in digital publishing in favor of distribution on social media and other platforms, along with a dramatic increase in demand for captivating video content…Today, we are announcing that Vocativ will shift to an all-video format…This means that we will be phasing out written stories.”

— Bleacher Report, February 2017: “A majority of the cuts were within the editorial operations department…With Bleacher Report investing more on higher-quality content, including original video and prominent writers like Howard Beck, these positions were no longer necessary to the company.”

— Mashable, April 2016: “We are now equally adept at telling
 stories in text and video, and those stories now live on social
 networks, over-the-top services and TV. Our ads live there too, with
 branded content now at the center of our ad offering.
To reflect these changes, we must organize our teams in a different
 way. Unfortunately this has led us to a very tough decision. Today we
 must part ways with some of our colleagues in order to focus our
 efforts.”^[179]

This mindless groupthink, indulged in by news organizations despite their own best judgment, is why we can’t read an online article in any major news magazine or newspaper of record without a video popping up on autoplay.

But it turned out that the metrics on which Facebook based the pivot to video — and on which its online imitators based their buy-in — were extremely faulty. And worse yet, Facebook was aware of the fact for some time while continuing to promote it dishonestly.

But even as Facebook executives were insisting publicly that video consumption was skyrocketing, it was becoming clear that some of the metrics the company had used to calculate time spent on videos were wrong. The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2016, three months after the Fortune panel, that Facebook had “vastly overestimated average viewing time for video ads on its platform for two years” by as much as “60 to 80 percent.” The company apologized in a blog post: “As soon as we discovered the discrepancy, we fixed it.”

A lawsuit filed by a group of small advertisers in California, however, argues that Facebook had known about the discrepancy for at least a year — and behaved fraudulently by failing to disclose it.

And further, contrary to Facebook’s claims to have overestimated by 80% at most, it turned out that the overestimate was by anywhere from 150% to 900%.^[180]

But as usual, the senior management who most enthusiastically embrace the latest “best practice,” based on recommendations from other equally clueless senior managers, are the last to acknowledge the lessons of experience. As late as 2021, six years after the birth of the pivot to video mania and almost as long after its fraudulence was exposed, Vice announced its intent to “‘reduce the number of old-fashioned text articles on Vice.com, Refinery29 and another Vice-owned site, i-D, by 40 to 50 percent,’ while increasing videos and visual stories on Instagram and YouTube ‘by the same amount’.”^[181]

But if you thought the pivot to video was bad, wait till the current newest New Thing, the pivot to AI, runs its course. According to Amy Castor and David Gerard, the latest wave of AI investment — unlike previous ones, which were largely funded by the Pentagon — is almost entirely venture capitalist-driven.^[182] That means the business strategy is a classic bezzle^[183]: to pump up asset values in the short term and then dump it on the suckers.

And its tangible results across the entire range of applications, so far, amount almost entirely to enshittification.

OpenAI’s AI-powered text generators fueled a lot of the hype around AI — but the real-world use case for large language models is overwhelmingly to generate content for spamming.

The use case for AI is spam web pages filled with ads. Google considers LLM-based ad landing pages to be spam, but seems unable or unwilling to detect and penalize it.

The use case for AI is spam books on Amazon Kindle. Most are “free” Kindle Unlimited titles earning money through subscriber pageviews rather than outright purchases.

The use case for AI is spam news sites for ad revenue.

The use case for AI is spam phone calls for automated scamming — using AI to clone people’s voices.

The use case for AI is spam Amazon reviews and spam tweets.

The use case for AI is spam videos that advertise malware.

The use case for AI is spam sales sites on Etsy.

The use case for AI is spam science fiction story submissions. Clarkesworld had to close submissions because of the flood of unusable generated garbage. The robot apocalypse in action….

For commercial purposes, the only use case for AI is still to replace quality work with cheap ersatz bot output — in the hope of beating down labor costs….

Microsoft put $10 billion into OpenAI. The Bing search engine added AI chat — and it had almost no effect on user numbers. It turns out that search engine users don’t want weird bot responses full of errors.^[184]

Under the heading of replacing quality work with cheap ersatz bot output, online news content threatens to be one of the first casualties.

Early this year, CNET was caught having published dozens of AI-generated articles. In response, CNET announced it was “pausing” the practice. The bot-written content was

designed to game Google searches with SEO-friendly keywords so lucrative affiliate ads can be plastered on the pages. CNET’s parent company, Red Ventures, which also owns publications like Bankrate, The Points Guy, and CreditCards.com, stands to benefit every time a reader signs up for a credit card from one of the highly trafficked articles.

CNET editor Connie Guglielmo issued a specimen of Official Happy Talk worthy of Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino: “Expect CNET to continue exploring and testing how AI can be used to help our teams as they go about their work testing, researching and crafting the unbiased advice and fact-based reporting we’re known for.”^[185]

Gannett experienced a similar embarrassment, being “forced to pause its use of AI earlier this year because the resulting product was laughably bad and full of obvious errors.” Then again in October, it “once again [came] under fire for allegedly making up writer bylines as cover for a different low-quality AI experiment.”^[186] It was oddly appropriate, considering Gannett was already notorious as one of the first McNewspaper chains to buy up and enshittify local papers nationwide.

The latest example — it was in the news just this past week, at the time of writing — was Sports Illustrated. SI joined the ranks of other companies that, in the words of Karl Bode, have made it “very clear they see [Large Language Models] primarily as a way to attack labor and cut corners, resulting in soulless and low quality product, oodles of plagiarism, and no shortage of employee ill will.”

So many of the executives at major media giants genuinely view AI as a way to create an automated ad-engagement machine that effectively shits money for pennies on the dollar. Just a giant, automated ouroboros that throws billions in ad engagement dollars their way without concerns about any of the pesky stuff like product quality, audience interest, public welfare, or folks eager to be paid a living wage.

There’s no interest in journalism or even editorial ethics here; Sports Illustrated not only created fake people with fake headshots and fake bylines, they constantly rotated new fake reporters in and out without any transparency with readers or staff. There’s a lack of ethics and competency that’s a problem before language learning models even enter the frame.^[187]

There’s a reason the quality of prose in bot-written articles is so mediocre — or, as  Ronke Babajide terms it, “idiocracy on steroids”:

AI gives us the most likely output for any request. And the probability that a text is mediocre is much higher than the probability that it is great. And that is precisely the problem.

AI amplifies and reproduces the most mediocre, interchangeable results that humanity has produced in the last centuries.^[188]

Overall, the impact of AI-generated content, if the trend continues to its logical conclusion, will be to drown any remaining useful and relevant content in a sea of bot-generated shit — to transform the Web into a Library of Babel. As James Vincent describes it:

In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with “AI-generated junk.” Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don’t. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and “AI is tearing Wikipedia apart.”^[189]

Tech and the Platform Economy. Edward Ongweso Jr. argues that the model of tech startup funding by venture capital has resulted in both massively wrongheaded decisions driven by groupthink, and in the large-scale destruction of value.

Venture capitalists tout themselves as investors who take on big risks by finding value — they provide capital to entrepreneurs lacking the revenue or credit to get traditional financing, but whose big ideas promise to change the world (and make some money along the way)….

The reality, however, is that VCs are herd animals. The industry is overconcentrated… and structurally drives capital into a few well-connected hands who pile it into larger funds, cut it into larger checks, and hand it off to a tightly knit network of entrepreneurs and startups.

There is a risk “embedded in the core of the venture capital model.” Its costs outweigh its benefits. And the costs boil down to enshittification.

We got benefits largely limited to the realm of consumer goods and services, like cheap on-demand delivery and ride-hail (so long as you ignored the exploitation that powered them) and cheap streaming services (until they began hiking prices), namely. But what were the costs? Startups that revolutionized the militarization of our border and our migrant deportation operations, helped weaponize robots, offered A.I. services that exploit invisible underpaid workers in the Global South, and roiled urban transit, rental, and restaurant markets. These projects and others generated billions for investors who got in on an early fundraising round, but they also degraded the quality of life for people across the world.

To put it more plainly, for the past 10 years venture capitalists have had near-perfect laboratory conditions to create a lot of money and make the world a much better place. And yet, some of their proudest accomplishments that have attracted some of the most eye-watering sums have been: 1) chasing the dream of zeroing out labor costs while monopolizing a sector to charge the highest price possible (A.I. and the gig economy); 2) creating infrastructure for speculating on digital assets that will be used to commodify more and more of our daily lives (cryptocurrency and the metaverse); and 3) militarizing public space, or helping bolster police and military operations.

You would be hard-pressed to find another parasite that has so thoroughly wrecked the body and environment of its host, all while trying to convince the host that it is deserving of praise and further accommodation.^[190]

Ongweso expressed the same general sentiments in much harsher terms on his Twitter account:

Venture capitalists are parasites who couldn’t be trusted with the financial institution that held up their industry, let alone the direction of our technological development. Euthanizing them is imperative if we want a better world.

VCs would rather gamble with other people’s money, enrich themselves and friends, rewrite laws and restructure markets in their own favor, and offload as many costs as possible onto the public than build anything of value.^[191]

As an example of the herd mentality of VCs and private equity, Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer notes how the concentration of ownership of tech firms leads to group and industry-wide pressure for destructive cuts in human capital.

The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly evidence-based.

I’ve had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also….

Layoffs are contagious across industries and within industries. The logic driving this, which doesn’t sound like very sensible logic because it’s not, is people say, “Everybody else is doing it, why aren’t we?”

Retailers are pre-emptively laying off staff, even as final demand remains uncertain. Apparently, many organizations will trade off a worse customer experience for reduced staffing costs, not taking into account the well-established finding that is typically much more expensive to attract new customers than it is to keep existing ones happy.^[192]

As an example of such groupthink, consider the recent mass layoffs in the tech sector, driven by a handful of venture capitalists. They were based entirely on the assessment, Cory Doctorow writes, that the rent extraction enabled by destroying value would exceed any profits to be made through productive activity:

“Activist investors” have triggered massive waves of tech layoffs, firing so many tech workers so quickly that it’s hard to even come up with an accurate count. The total is somewhere around 280,000 workers….

These layoffs have nothing to do with “trimming the fat” or correcting the hiring excesses of the lockdown. They’re a project to transfer value from workers, customers and users to shareholders. Google’s layoff of 12,000 workers followed fast on the heels of gargantuan stock buyback where the company pissed away enough money to pay those 12,000 salaries…for the next 27 years.

The equation is simple: the more companies invest in maintenance, research, development, moderation, anti-fraud, customer service and all the other essential functions of the business, the less money there is to remit to people who do nothing and own everything.^[193]

Indeed, there’s probably no single better illustration of the ways in which rentierism has promoted value destruction and enshittification than in the tech and platform economy. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, retail platforms like Amazon, and so-called “sharing economy” apps like Uber and Airbnb, are all rife with enshittification. Intellectual property, combined with other artificial scarcities like no-compete clauses and legal penalties for “felony contempt of business model,” enables platforms to lock users in through network effects.

Network effects raise the cost, from the user’s perspective, of switching from one platform to another. As an illustration, consider the telephone. For the first person to install it, the telephone was useless until a second person was connected. At that point it acquired some value to the extent that the two might want to talk to each other. As additional users were added to the system, the number of potential interactions — and the value of the system to any given user — increased as the square of the number of users (Metcalfe’s Law).

A social media platform has lock-in over its users to the extent that they hesitate to leave because of the number of connections they have there. Time and again, new social media platforms are set up as alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, and attempt to lure disgruntled users from the increasingly enshittified older platforms. But regardless of how superior the user interface or terms of service of the new platform are, it quickly reaches a saturation point at, at most, one or two percent of the Facebook and Twitter user base. The reason? People don’t want to migrate because none of their old Facebook or Twitter friends are on the new platform.

Companies like high switching costs. For a would-be monopolist, the best product is one that’s seductively easy to start using and incredibly hard to get rid of….

But when you want to leave Facebook, there’s no easy way to do so. You can’t go to a Facebook rival and follow what your friends post to Facebook from there. You certainly can’t reply to what your Facebook friends post using a rival service….^[194]

Occasionally one large social media platform does supplant another, as when the demise of Myspace coincided with the rise of Facebook. Right now, younger platforms like the Fediverse, Bluesky, and Threads are jostling to be first in line to occupy the former niche of Twitter/X, if and when it succumbs to what appears likely to be a terminal enshittification process under its present Dunning Kruger-stricken owner. But even in such cases, the overall oligopoly structure and resulting power imbalance between the platforms and their users remains the same.^[195]

And, predictably, businesses with captive clienteles will take advantage of their position to shamelessly abuse their customers.

Businesspeople understand the risks of competition, which is why they seek to extinguish it. The harder it is for your customers to leave – because of a lack of competitors or because of lock-in – the worse you can treat them without risking their departure. This is the core of enshittification: a company that is neither disciplined by competition nor regulation can abuse its customers and suppliers over long timescales without losing either….^[196]

The irony is that an actual venture capitalist —  Sarah Kunst, “managing director of Cleo Capital, a San Francisco firm that invests in early-stage startups” — inadvertently, in the process of defending venture capital, admits just why it’s a bad idea to depend on VCs and walled garden, IP-protected platforms to allocate capital investment.

“When you say: ‘Oh, I don’t care about Silicon Valley,’ yes, that might sound fine. But the reality is very few of us are Luddites,” Kunst says. “Imagine you wake up and go to unlock your door, and because they’re a tech company banking with SVB who can no longer make payroll, your app isn’t working and you’re struggling to unlock your door.”^[197]

To me, that sounds less like a reason for giving venture capitalists more money, and more like a reason for voiding the intellectual property of the tech company, opening its code, and forcibly jailbreaking it, so that users aren’t at the mercy of a dead-man switch to keep using it. Better yet, just taking the function of financing new platforms away from people who can use their monopoly over finance to enclose them in such a manner. Or in Doctorow’s more colorful phrasing:

Here’s a terrible reason to support the SVB bailout: because if we let all the tech companies who did business with it fail, you might not be able to get into your house anymore after your smart-lock fails because the cloud service it depends on cuts off the startup that made it because their bank account went up in a puff of smoke…

Look, if you think the fact that my Internet of Shit door-lock failed because the company that designed it made no plan to let me into my house if they went out of business would make me sympathetic to that company, you are out of your fucking mind. If that happened to me, it would make me want to tear the lock out of my door, hunt down the CEO of the company that made it, set the lock on fire, and throw it through their front window.^[198]

In the case of platforms like social media, Uber, Airbnb, and the like, enshittification is enabled by “the nature of a ‘two sided market,’ where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”^[199]

…Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer….

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.^[200]

Enshittifying proprietary, walled garden platforms is easy because it can be accomplished by digitally “twiddling” (Doctorow’s word) the rules of a platform to rip off buyers, sellers, and anyone else in a stakeholder position of any kind — usually in ways that are completely opaque to those stakeholders.

The “gig economy” is rife with these practices. Companies like Doordash want to criminalize tools that let drivers see how much a job will pay before they commit to it. Uber is a notorious twiddler of the driver-compensation knobs, exploiting the ease of changing pay structures to stay one step ahead of drivers. Sometimes, Uber overreaches and finds itself on the wrong end of a wage-theft investigation, but for every twiddle that draws a state Attorney General’s attention, there are dozens of smaller twiddles that slide under the radar….

For independent sellers, Amazon’s twiddling has piled junk fee upon junk fee, so that today, Amazon’s fees account for the majority of the price of goods on Amazon Marketplace.

Advertisers and publishers are also on the wrong side of twiddling. The FTC’s lawsuit against Facebook and the DoJ’s antitrust case against Google are both full of eye-watering examples of high-speed shell-games where twiddling the knobs resulted in nearly undetectable frauds that ripped off both sides of the adtech market (publishers and advertisers) to the benefit of the tech companies….

As Douglas Rushkoff puts it, the platforms have “gone meta” — rather than providing goods or services, they have devoted themselves to sitting between people who provide goods and services and people who want to consume them. It’s chokepoint capitalism, a market where the intermediaries have ceased serving as facilitators and now run the show.^[201]

One especially toxic example of platform enshittification is the way in which so many corporations and other institutions have outsourced employment through staffing agencies — in turn driving, simultaneously, reduced pay and increased precarity for the workers who are replacing those previously employed directly and full-time by the institutions themselves.

Now, if you think about it for even a second, it’s obvious that there’s only one way that hiring a doorman through a staffing agency could be cheaper than just hiring the doorman: the staffing agency has to pay the doorman less. A lot less, because the staffing agency is making money here, too – so the doorman is splitting that lower payment with the agency.

These staffing agencies rely on another form of artificial property right — non-compete clauses — if not to outright prevent, at least to make it much more difficult, for workers and clients to disintermediate and deal directly with each other for better terms on both ends. Similar clauses, binding on employers, charge massive penalties for directly hiring workers previously contracted through the agencies.^[202]

And all of these platforms depend on intellectual property to prevent users from altering their configuration in a way that makes them more user-friendly.

While it remains technically possible to reconfigure the technologies that you rely on, doing so is now a legal minefield. “IP” has come to mean “any law that lets a company control the conduct of its competitors, critics or customers,” and that’s why “IP” is always at the heart of maneuvers to block platform users’ attempts to wrestle value away from the platforms.^[203]

Nowhere in the platform economy — as mentioned briefly above — is rent extraction and enshittification so egregious as in the so-called gig economy, where intellectual property puts platform owners in a position to screw over both customers and workers. In the gig economy,

workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know – and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

Cory Doctorow coined the term “reverse centaur” to describe the relationship between the gig worker and the technology.

In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction….

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip….

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry – a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control – but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded….

The rise and rise of bossware – which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars – has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized – a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited….

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise….

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

…Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job – to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn – is booted off the app and denied further journeys.^[204]

Of course, the switching costs from network effects only result in lock-in when the only choices presented by a platform are to use it or leave, with nothing in between. It would be possible to nullify network effects as a barrier to migration, using a principle Doctorow calls “adversarial interoperability.”

“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.

But interoperability is just the ante. For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.^[205]

In the case of social media, this means you could piggyback user-governed instances as overlays of the Facebook or Twitter architecture (basically the Fediverse model), and import and continue to interact with your old Facebook and Twitter connections, but with your own terms of service and features — all without the permission of Facebook or Twitter. With adversarial interoperability,

Facebook alternatives like Diaspora could use their users’ logins and passwords to fetch the Facebook messages the service had queued up for them and allow those users to reply to them from Diaspora, without being spied on by Facebook. Mastodon users could read and post to Twitter without touching Twitter’s servers. Hundreds or thousands of services could spring up that allowed users different options to block harassment and bubble up interesting contributions from other users — both those on the incumbent social media services, and the users of these new upstarts. It’s true that unlike Usenet, Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to block this kind of federation, so perhaps the experience won’t be as seamless as it was for alt. users mixing their feeds in with the backbone’s feeds, but the main hurdle – moving to a new service without having to convince everyone to come with you – could be vanquished.^[206]

Doctorow envisions a similar model of adversarial interoperability for ride-sharing apps:

Imagine if I could install a version of [Austin’s driver-governed ride-sharing app] Ride (call it Meta-Uber) that knew about all the driver co-ops in the world. When I landed, I’d page a car with Uber or Lyft, but once a driver accepted the hail, my Meta-Uber app would signal the driver’s phone and ask, “Do you have a driver co-op app on your phone?” If the driver and I both had the co-op app, our apps would cancel the Uber reservation and re-book the trip with Meta-Uber.

That way, we could piggyback on the installed base of Uber and Lyft cars, the billions they’ve poured into getting rideshare services legalized in cities around the world, the marketing billions they’ve spent making us all accustomed to the idea of rideshare services.

This Meta-Uber service would allow for a graceful transition from the shareholder-owned rideshares to worker co-ops. When you needed a car, you’d get one, without having to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of no drivers because there are no passengers because there are no drivers. One fare at a time, we could cannibalize Lyft and Uber into the poorhouse.

The billions they’ve spent to establish “first-mover advantages” wouldn’t be unscalable stone walls around their business: they’d be immovable stone weights around their necks. Lyft and Uber would have multi-billion-dollar capital overhangs that their investors would expect to recoup, while the co-ops that nimbly leapt over Uber and Lyft would not have any such burden.

The same model could be applied to virtually any platform: “a Meta-Amazon that places your order with the nearest indy bookstore instead; a Meta-OpenTable that redirects your booking to a co-op booking tool.”^[207]

Interoperability improves self-determination by safeguarding your abil­ity change the your current situation by incremental steps: if you like your phone and the apps you have, but want an app that’s banned in its default app store, interoperability comes to the rescue, allowing you to add a second app store to your phone’s list of approved software sources. You get to keep your phone, keep your apps, keep all the data on your phone, and you get to install that unauthorized app.

Without interoperability, your choice is “take it or leave it”…

Writ large, interoperability encompasses things like democracy: when someone says they like their city but not its bylaws, we don’t tell them that the law is the law and the home comes with these bylaws in a package. Instead, we set out processes for amending or repealing laws that chafe the people they govern. And, if you fail in your bid to reform your city’s laws, you can move to another city without having to surrender the possessions in your home or your social relations with your old neighbors. Interoper­ability lets you replace the laws and keep your house, or replace your house and find new laws….^[208]

But the media conglomerates and “sharing” apps have made it impossible to circumvent network effects lock-in, thanks to legal barriers.

Between software copyrights, anti-circum­vention rules, software patents, enforceable terms of service, trade secrecy, non-compete agreements, and the pending (at the time of this writing) Oracle/Google dispute over API copyrights, any attempt to interoperate with an existing product service with­out permission from its corporate master is a legal suicide mission, an invitation to almost unlimited civil – and even criminal! – litigation. That is to say: if you dare to modify, improve, or replace an existing, dominant software-based product or service, you risk bankruptcy and a long prison sentence….

Interoperability lowers “switching costs” – the cost of leaving behind whatever you’re using now in favor of something you think will suit you better….

Companies like high switching costs. For a would-be monopolist, the best product is one that’s seductively easy to start using and incredibly hard to get rid of….

But when you want to leave Facebook, there’s no easy way to do so. You can’t go to a Facebook rival and follow what your friends post to Facebook from there. You certainly can’t reply to what your Facebook friends post using a rival service….

The thicket of anti-interoperability rules that has sprung up around in­teroperability has a catch-all name: “intellectual property.”^[209]

This intellectual property, broadly defined, extends far beyond patents and copyright to include a host of other restraints on competition.

Tech law is a minefield of overly broad, superannuated rules that have been systematically distorted by companies that used “disruption” to batter their way into old industries, but now use these laws to shield themselves from any pressure from upstarts to seek to disrupt them.

First is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, passed in 1986 in part to assuage Ronald Reagan’s panic after seeing the movie Wargames (I am not making this up). CFAA is nominally an anti-computer-intrusion statute, which criminalizes “exceeding your authorization” on a computer that doesn’t belong to you. Even when it passed, more than 40 years ago, technologically clued-in scholars and practicioners warned that this was way too broadly defined, and that someday we might see this rule used to felonize normal activities involving computers we owned, because the computers would have to talk to a server to accomplish part of their work, and the server’s owner could use onerous “user agreements” and “terms of service” to define our authorization. If this became widespread, then these licenses could take on the force of criminal law, and violating them could become a jailable offense.

40 years later, those fears are vindicated: CFAA is used to threaten, intimidate, sue, and even jail people engaged in otherwise perfectly lawful activity, merely because they have violated some term of service on the way….

Then there’s Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a Bill Clinton bill that creates a felony for “bypassing an effective means of access control” (AKA Digital Rights Management or DRM) for copyrighted works.

…[Today, DRM] is used for “business model enforcement,” to ensure that disruptive, but legal, ways of using a product or service are made illegal – from refilling your printer’s ink cartridge to getting your car or phone serviced by an independent neighborhood repair shop.

Together, the CFAA and DMCA have given digital businesses access to a shadowy legal doctrine that was never written by Congress but is nevertheless routinely enforced by the courts: Felony Contempt of Business-Model.

The CFAA and DMCA 1201 have been carefully distorted into defensive, anti-disruption shields that are only available to digital businesses. Taxi medallion owners can’t use the CFAA and DMCA 1201 to keep Uber and Lyft out of their cities.

But Uber and Lyft could use these legal tools to keep Meta-Uber out of their bottom lines. Uber and Lyft have lengthy terms-of-service that set out the rules under which you are authorized to communicate with Uber and Lyft’s servers. These terms of service prohibit using their servers to locate drivers for any purpose other than booking a ride. They certainly don’t permit you to locate a driver and then cancel the booking and re-book with a co-op app.

And Uber and Lyft’s apps are encrypted on your phone, so to reverse-engineer them, you’d have to decrypt them (probably by capturing an image of their decrypted code while it was running in a virtual phone simulated on a desktop computer). Decrypting an app without permission is “bypassing an effective means of access control” for a copyrighted work (the app is made up of copyrighted code).^[210]

Intellectual Property and the Right to Repair. The same phenomenon extends into the physical world, with the use of intellectual property to thwart the right to repair physical goods that one supposedly owns.

Companies can monopolize the right to repair by using DRM to block replacement parts produced by anyone else, running appliances and machinery on proprietary software, and by using proprietary diagnostic software available only to their own service centers. “Best of all,” Doctorow says, “a repair monopoly lets manufacturers decide when your stuff is ‘beyond repair,’ whereupon they can offer you a generous ‘trade-in rebate’ if you buy a new gadget.” Planned obsolescence is very much the conscious goal. Apple’s Tim Cook “warned his shareholders that the biggest threat to the business was people fixing their phones rather than replacing them.”^[211]

DRM is an especially powerful weapon, because circumventing it is not just a civil offense — it’s a felony.

Even more powerful is DRM. Thanks to Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, making tools to bypass a “copyright access control” is a felony. Software is copyrighted, so if your product has a chip in it, you can wrap it in a thin layer of “access controls” (DRM). Anyone [who] makes a tool to bypass that DRM – say, to extract diagnostic information or activate a new part – commits a felony.

A company that puts cheap microcontrollers into its gadgets can make it a literal crime to reconfigure your own property so that it serves you, rather than the company’s shareholders. The falling price of chips (notwithstanding our current supply-chain blip) encouraged manufacturers to deploy this strategy to monopolize all repair.

The automotive sector was an early adopter of these dirty tricks. Car companies hate independent mechanics and third-party parts companies and have waged war on them for decades. By adding DRM to our cars, the auto makers found a way to block third-party parts, and to prevent independent mechanics from interpreting diagnostic messages….

All of these switching costs may seem technological, but they’re actually legal. The universality of computers means that you could absolutely switch from iOS to Android and keep running your apps in a virtual machine. There’s no technical reason you can’t install modified HP printer software that lets you use third-party ink. There’s no technical reason you can’t leave Facebook but continue to participate in the messaging and groups you left behind….

The reason you can’t do these things is that it’s illegal. The reverse-engineering, scraping and other guerrilla tactics you need to accomplish these things without the manufacturers’ cooperation put you at risk of prosecution under cybersecurity, copyright, trademark and other laws.^[212]

The proliferation of microchips running on proprietary software in present-day cars, and the resulting brittleness and enshittification of auto design — something universally despised by car owners, that creates endless additional points of failure — reflects a conscious and rational strategy on the part of the auto companies.

Digital control systems are the “underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality.”

From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities….

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products….

Nevertheless, auto makers are willing to “enshittify their products so comprehensively” because digitization is one of the best mechanisms for rent extraction ever created.

Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?…

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve…

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that farkakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card. But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable…. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you….^[213]

John Deere pursues the same strategy, running its tractors’ DRMed proprietary software so that it can price-gouge farmers on repairs. Without the company’s authorized diagnostic software at an authorized repair location, the tractor is “a very big paperweight.” Many farmers have responded by obtaining pirated and jailbroken versions of John Deere software from hackers in Eastern Europe.^[214]

At the height of Covid’s onslaught on intensive care units, repair techs similarly thwarted predatory manufacturers and kept ventilators running by adding on a cobbled-together device from Polish hardware hackers and circumventing the machines’ proprietary operating systems.^[215]

The manufacturers of inkjet printers used the same strategy to limit their customers to the companies’ own proprietary ink cartridges. They started out by selling half-empty cartridges as full, and using copyright law to prohibit third parties from refilling them. Then patents; then DRMing the printers to reject even cheaper, non-authorized paper. One company goes so far as to install (non-replaceable) sponges to soak up “excess ink,” which could otherwise allegedly stain your furniture, and then brick the entire printer after a certain amount of usage because that sponge might be used up. Circumventing any of this hardware DRM, in order to fix what the company deliberately broke, is a felony.^[216]

Most despicable of all, some human tapeworms are applying the inkjet DRM strategy to insulin pumps.^[217]

Conclusion

Throughout the history of capitalism, capitalist profit consisted for the most part of rentier income. Even the classic model of profit on industrial capital centered on the extraction of surplus labor through an unequal power relationship. But under industrial capitalism, there was at least some competitive pressure for real technical innovation and increased productivity.

We’ve long since reached the point where the conditions for the realization of profit directly impede technological progress and the creation of real use-value. Not only is monetized obstruction of value creation the primary source of profit, but what little progress remains amounts to gold-plated turds and the addition of bells and whistles that make things less usable. In the words of Marx, the social relations of production have become a constraint on further progress. Capitalist ownership is a set of shackles on the human intellect and imagination. The only way forward is to destroy capitalism.

 

Endotes

^[1] Cory Doctorow, “Tiktok’s enshittification,” Pluralistic, January 21, 2023 <https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys>.

^[2] Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1963) pp. 22, 277-8.

^[3] Yanis Varoufakis, Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Vintage, 2023), p. 9. Pagination is from the pdf version hosted on Library Genesis at <https://library.lol/main/237B9809D7FA1E66FAE735D06DCB2A27> (obtained October 27, 2023).

^[4] Ibid., p. 10.

^[5] Ibid., p. 79.

^[6] Ibid., p. 84.

^[7] Ibid., p. 210.

^[8] Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays For It? (London and New York: Verso, 2020), pp. 23-24. All page references to this book will be from CloudConvert’s pdf conversion of the epub version hosted by Library Genesis at <http://library.lol/main/C0B801D70D3E9DFF6041355CFD9B99F0> (downloaded Sept. 30, 2023).

^[9] Ibid., p. 23.

^[10] Ibid., p. 24.

^[11] Thorstein Veblen, “On the Nature of Capital: Investment, Intangible Assets, and the Pecuniary Magnate,” Quarterly Journal of Economics volume 23, issue 1 (November 1908), p. 108.

^[12] Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: B.W. Huebsch, Inc., 1921), p. 27.

^[13] Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism: Some Essays in Economic Tradition. Second revised edition (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, Ltd., 1940, 1960), p.66.

^[14] John R. Commons, Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York: MacMillan, 1924), pp. 20-21, 53-54, 369.

^[15] Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, p. 28.

^[16] Cory Doctorow, “Autoenshittification,” Pluralistic, July 24, 2023 <https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon>.

^[17] Thomas Hodgskin, “Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital: Or the Unproductiveness of Capital proved with Reference to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen” (1825). Marxists.org <https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/hodgskin/labour-defended.htm>.

^[18] Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy. Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827). Online Library of Liberty <https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/hodgskin-popular-political-economy-four-lectures-delivered-at-the-london-mechanics-institution>.

^[19] Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832). Online Library of Liberty <https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/hodgskin-the-natural-and-artificial-right-of-property-contrasted>.

^[20] Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, p. 41.

^[21] Mark J. Green, et al., eds., The Closed Enterprise System. Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on Antitrust Enforcement (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972), p. 14.

^[22] Paul Goodman, People or Personnel, in People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province (New York: Vintage Books, 1964, 1966), p. 58.

^[23] Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis. Edited from manuscript by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 717, 1114.

^[24] Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, pp. 108, 110-111.

^[25] Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (Penguin, 2018), pp. 112-113. All page references to this book will be from CloudConvert’s pdf conversion of the epub version hosted by Library Genesis at <https://library.lol/main/7BD7A9996DE444F66BEB6B856056899E> (downloaded Oct. 11, 2023).

^[26] Marjorie Kelly, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler, 2023), p. 120.

^[27] Ibid., p. 121.

^[28] Guy Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (Hull, UK: Biteback Publishing, 2017), pp. 29-30. All page references to this book will be from CloudConvert’s pdf conversion of the epub version hosted by Library Genesis at <http://library.lol/main/A9E0D32C233011454C99E67DC394CF2A> (downloaded Oct. 8, 2023).

^[29] Mazzucato, The Value of Everything:, pp. 133, 134 (graphic).

^[30] Timothy Taylor, “Financial Sector Share of Profits,” Conversable Economist, September 13, 2022 <https://conversableeconomist.com/2022/09/13/financial-services-share-of-profits>.

^[31] Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, p. 131. A

^[32]  Ibid., p. 131.

^[33] Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism, pp. 27, 43n.

^[34] Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 1999), p. 195.

^[35] Ibid., p. 197.

^[36] Ibid., p. 198.

^[37] John Curl, For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009), pp. 33-34.

^[38] Klein, No Logo, p. 196.

^[39] Ibid., pp. 196-197.

^[40] Ibid., p. 206.

^[41] Ibid., p. 227.

^[42] Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, p. 167.

^[43] Ibid., p. 167.

^[44] Doctorow, “Autoenshittification.”  

^[45] Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, p. 154.

^[46] David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Allen Lane, 2018), pp. 190-191.

^[47] Ibid., pp. 176-177.

^[48] Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism, pp. 28-29. Oct. 8, 2023).

^[49] Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, “Notes from the Editors (October 1993),” reprinted as “The Puzzle of Financialization,” reprinted in Monthly Review 74:10 (March 2023) <https://monthlyreview.org/2023/03/01/the-puzzle-of-financialization/>.

^[50] Magdoff and Sweezy, “The Financial Explosion” (1985), in Magdoff and Sweezy, editors, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), p. 149.

^[51] Varoufakis, Techno-Feudalism, p. 90.

^[52] Brett Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World (London and New York: Verso, 2023), p. 20. Pagination is from the Cloud Convert pdf conversion of the epub version hosted by Anna’s Archive at <https://annas-archive.org/md5/8206ef0443f77fbda2267fac349bf1dc>. Accessed October 21, 2023.

^[53] Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, p. 159.

^[54] Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios, p. 20.

^[55] Ibid., pp. 23, 24.

^[56] Ibid., pp. 17-18.

^[57] Ibid., pp. 110-111.

^[58] Ibid., p. 112.

^[59] Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, p. 62.

^[60] Ibid., p. 283.

^[61]Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios, p. 47.

^[62] Ibid., p. 48.

^[63] Ibid., p. 118.

^[64] Ibid., p. 119.

^[65] Ibid., pp. 121-122.

^[66] Kelly, Wealth Supremacy, p. 17.

^[67] Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, p. 22.

^[68] Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, p. 67.

^[69] Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, pp. 102-103.

^[70] Ibid., p. 104.

^[71] Ibid., p. 116.

^[72] Ibid., p. 107.

^[73] Cory Doctorow, “Private equity’s healthcare playbook is terrifying,” Pluralistic, May 21, 2020 <https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted>.

^[74] Doctorow, “The long lineage of private equity’s looting,” Pluralistic, June 2, 2023 <https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/>.

^[75] Thomas Katterton Williams (@literally.party), Bluesky, November 27, 2023 <https://staging.bsky.app/profile/literally.party/post/3kf7stcc7ch2d>.

^[76] Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios, p. 64.

^[77]  Ibid., p. 183.

^[78] Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022), pp. 40-41.

^[79] Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios, pp. 179-180.

^[80] Brendan Ballou, “Private Equity Is Gutting America — and Getting Away With It,” New York Times, April 28, 2023 <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.html>.

^[81] Abha Bhattarai, “‘How can they walk away with millions and leave workers with zero?’ Toys R Us workers say they deserve severance,” Washington Post, June 1, 2008 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/01/how-can-they-walk-away-with-millions-and-leave-workers-with-zero-toys-r-us-workers-say-they-deserve-severance/>.

^[82] Bryce Covert, “The Toys ‘R’ Us Bankruptcy and Private Equity,” The Atlantic, July/August 2018 <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-us-bankruptcy-private-equity/561758/>.

^[83] Derek Seidman, “Labor Organizers Launch a New Model for the Fight Against Private Equity,” Truthout, May 9, 2023 <https://truthout.org/articles/labor-organizers-launch-a-new-model-for-the-fight-against-private-equity/>.

^[84] Robert Kuttner, “It Was Vulture Capitalism that Killed Sears,” The American Prospect, October 16, 2018 <https://prospect.org/economy/vulture-capitalism-killed-sears/>.

^[85] Maureen Tkacik, “Days of Plunder,” The American Prospect, June 2, 2023 <https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/>.

^[86] Doctorow, “The long lineage of private equity’s looting.”  

^[87] David Dayen, “The real Olive Garden scandal: Why greedy hedge funders suddenly care so much about breadsticks,” Salon, September 17, 2014 <https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/>.

^[88] Doctorow, “The long lineage of private equity’s looting.”  

^[89] Tkacik, “Days of Plunder.”  

^[90] Cory Doctorow, “Rail monopolies destroyed the American supply chain,” Pluralistic, February 4, 2022 <https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons>.

^[91] Aaron Gordon, “It’s Going to End Up Like Boeing: How Freight Rail Is Courting Catastrophe,” Motherboard, March 22, 2021 <https://www.vice.com/en/article/3angy3/freight-rail-train-disaster-avoidable-boeing>.

^[92] Heather Vogell, “When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord,” ProPublica, February 7, 2002 <https://www.propublica.org/article/when-private-equity-becomes-your-landlord>.

^[93] Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios, p. 177.

^[94] Vogell, “When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord.”  

^[95] Doctorow, “The long lineage of private equity’s looting.”  

^[96] Sheelah Kolhatkar, “What Happens When Investment Firms Acquire Trailer Parks,” The New Yorker, March 8, 2021 <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/what-happens-when-investment-firms-acquire-trailer-parks>.

^[97] Rick Paulas, “Hidden landlords: renters’ woes soar as property owners hide their identities,” The Guardian, November 16, 2023 <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/16/hidden-landlords-limited-liability-companies-llcs-rental-property>.

^[98] Cory Doctorow, “The antitrust Twilight Zone,” Pluralistic, December 16, 2022 <https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken>.

^[99] Derek Seidman, “Private Equity is Using Prison Phone, Food, and Health Systems to Rack Up Profits,” Truthout, November 24, 2023 <https://truthout.org/articles/private-equity-is-using-prison-phone-food-and-health-systems-to-rack-up-profits/>.

^[100] Tim Requarth, “How Private Equity is Turning Public Prisons Into Big Profits,” The Nation, April 30, 2019 <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/prison-privatization-private-equity-hig/>.

^[101] Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, p. 180.

^[102] David M. Gordon, Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Management “Downsizing” (New York: The Free Press, 1996), pp. 4-5, 19, 52-54, 82.

^[103] For a general survey of corporate management accounting and the bureaucratic pathologies it spawns, see William Waddell and Norman Bodek, The Rebirth of American Industry: A Study of Lean Management (Vancouver, WA: PCS Press, 2005).

^[104] Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, p. 181.

^[105] David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2015), p. 120.

^[106] Ibid., pp. 121-122.

^[107] Ibid., p. 127.

^[108] Ibid., p. 143.

^[109] Julie Chernov Hwang on Twitter, July 25, 2023 <https://twitter.com/drjchernov/status/1683535771205025798>; tweets currently available because account is locked.

^[110] Gourjoine M. Wade, on Twitter, July 24, 2023 <https://twitter.com/DrGWadeSpeaks/status/1683694488659673090>.

^[111] Colin Crouch, “9. The Paradoxes of Privatisation and Public Service Outsourcing,” The Political Quarterly 86 (2015), p. 157.

^[112] Nicholas Hildyard, “The Myth of the Minimalist State,” The Corner House, March 31, 1998 <https://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/myth-minimalist-state>.

^[113] Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, p. 289.

^[114] Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios, p. 183.

^[115] Tim Swanson, “Texas Sized Tomfoolery,” Mises.org, September 9, 2003. No longer available. Quoted in Kevin A. Carson, “What Economic Freedom Indexes Leave Out,” The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, February 24, 2011 <https://fee.org/articles/what-economic-freedom-indexes-leave-out/>.

^[116] Colin Crouch, “9. The Paradoxes of Privatisation and Public Service Outsourcing,” The Political Quarterly 86 (2015), p. 159.

^[117] Ibid., pp. 161-162.

^[118] Ibid., p. 163.

^[119] Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, pp. 295-297.

^[120] Crouch, “9. The Paradoxes of Privatisation and Public Service Outsourcing,” pp. 160-161.

^[121] Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios, pp. 95-96.

^[122] Ibid., p. 101.

^[123] Ibid., p. 101.

^[124] Nicholas Hildyard, Licensed larceny: Infrastructure, financial extraction and the Global South (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), p. 8.

^[125] Ibid., p. 23.

^[126] Ibid., pp. 9, 39.

^[127] Ibid., p. 55.

^[128] Ibid., p. 56.

^[129] Ibid., p. 61.

^[130] Ibid., p. 33.

^[131] Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios, p. 149.

^[132] Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, p. 294. [M. Wolf, ‘Britain’s Utility Model Is Broken’, Financial Times, 12 June 2008]

^[133] Ibid., p. 294. [N. Hawkins, ‘Utility Gains: Assessing the Record of Britain’s Privatized Utilities’, September 2015, p. 1 – pdf available at static1.squarespace.com.]

^[134] Ibid., p. 311.

^[135] Kelly, Wealth Supremacy, p. 8.

^[136] Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, p. 192.

^[137] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 36-37.

^[138] Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, p. 192.

^[139] Johann Soderberg, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), p. 116.

^[140] Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Capetown, Singapore, São Paolo: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 1.

^[141] Ibid., p. 2.

^[142] Ibid., p. 16.

^[143] Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars (1996) <https://library.lol/fiction/45F0B7333766512896D7DBB4D82EFCBE>.

^[144] Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” p. 136.

^[145] Cory Doctorow, “Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it,” Pluralistic, October 19, 2023 <https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors>.

^[146] Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, p. 196.

^[147] Doctorow, “Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it.”  <https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors>.

^[148] Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, p. 185.

^[149] Boldrin and Levine, pp. 104-105.

^[150] Karl Bode, “HBO Max and Sesame Street Highlight The Stupidity Of Mindless Media Megamergers,” Techdirt, August 24, 2022 <https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/24/hbo-max-and-sesame-street-highlight-the-stupidity-of-mindless-media-megamergers/>.

^[151] Bode, “Disney Gets A Nice Fat Tax Break For Making Its Streaming Catalog Worse,” Techdirt, June 6, 2023 <https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/06/disney-gets-a-nice-fat-tax-break-for-making-its-streaming-catalog-worse/>.

^[152] Bode, “Paramount The Latest To Pull Titles From Paramount Plus Streaming Catalog For A Tax Cut And To Skimp On Paying Residuals,” Techdirt, July 5, 2023 <https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/05/paramount-the-latest-to-pull-titles-from-paramount-plus-streaming-catalog-for-a-tax-cut-and-to-skimp-on-paying-residuals/>.

^[153] Alison Foreman and Wilson Chapman, “87 Titles Unceremoniously Removed From HBO Max,” IndieWire, May 17, 2023 <https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/removed-hbo-max-movies-shows-warner-bros-discovery-merger-list/about-last-night-2/>; Drew Magary, “David Zaslav kills everything he touches, including GQ,” SFGATE, July 5, 2023 <https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/david-zaslav-gq-article-18186324.php>.

^[154] Jason Bailey, “How Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Became Public Enemy Number One in Hollywood,” GQ, July 23, 2023 (preserved at Internet Archive) <https://archive.ph/2023.07.03-160323/https://www.gq.com/story/david-zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-ceo-tcm-max#selection-601.0-601.87>; Foreman and Chapman, “87 Titled Unceremoniously Removed From HBO Max.”

^[155] Giblin and Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism, pp. 52-53.

^[156] Ibid., p. 54.

^[157] Mike Masnick, “Only 12 % of Music Revenue Goes To Actual Artists,” Techdirt, August 21, 2018 <https://www.techdirt.com/2018/08/21/only-12-music-revenue-goes-to-actual-artists/>.

^[158] Jon Caramanica, “It’s Got a Great Beat, and You Can File a Lawsuit to It,” New York Times, January 6, 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/arts/music/pop-music-songs-lawsuits.html>.

^[159] Amy X. Wang, “How Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits,” Rolling Stone, January 9, 2020 <https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/music-copyright-lawsuits-chilling-effect-935310/>.

^[160] Cory Doctorow, “Private equity plunderers want to buy Simon & Schuster,” Pluralistic, August 8, 2023 <https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/08/vampire-capitalism/>.

^[161] Ibid.,

^[162] Carter Dougherty and Andrew Park, “Private Equity Comes for Book Publishing,” The Atlantic, September 9, 2023 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/private-equity-simon-and-schuster/675261/>.

^[163] Heather Morrison, “Elsevier 2009 $2 billion profits could fund worldwide OA at $1,383 per article,” The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, April 7, 2010 <https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/04/elsevier-2009-2-billion-profits-could.html>.

^[164] David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley, and Kenneth Weir, “Publisher, be damned! From price gouging to the open road,” Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation 31:3 (2013), p. 231.

^[165]George Monbiot, “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist,” The Guardian, August 29, 2011 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist>.

^[166] Harvie, et al., “Publisher, be damned!” pp. 231, 233.

^[167] Monbiot, “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist.”

^[168] Glyn Moody, “Leading Open Access Supporters Ask EU To Investigate Elsevier’s Alleged ‘Anti-Competitive Practices’,” Techdirt, November 8, 2018 <https://www.techdirt.com/2018/11/08/leading-open-access-supporters-ask-eu-to-investigate-elseviers-alleged-anti-competitive-practices/>.

^[169] Henry Farrell, “College textbooks are a racket,” Washington Post, October 21, 2015 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/10/21/college-textbooks-are-a-racket/>.

^[170] Joe Nocera, “Imagine if Gordon Gekko Bought News Empires,” Bloomberg, March 26, 2018 <https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-26/alden-global-capital-s-business-model-destroys-newspapers-for-little-gain>.

^[171] McKay Coppins, “A Secretive Hedge Fund is Gutting Newsrooms: Inside Alden Global Capital,” The Atlantic, October 21, 2021 <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-global-capital-killing-americas-newspapers/620171/>.

^[172] Julie Reynolds, “Meet the Vulture Capitalists Who Savaged ‘The Denver Post’,” The Nation, April 13, 2018 <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/meet-the-vulture-capitalists-who-savaged-the-denver-post/>.

^[173] Michael Ewens, Arpit Gupta, and Sabrina T. Howell, “Local Journalism Under Private Equity Ownership.” Working Paper 29743 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2022), pp. 1-2.

^[174] Elain Godfrey, “What We Lost When Gannett Came to Town,” The Atlantic, October 5, 2021 <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/10/gannett-local-newspaper-hawk-eye-iowa/619847/>.

^[175] Laura Hazard Owen, “Did Facebook’s faulty data push news publishers to make terrible decisions on video?” NiemanLab, October 17, 2018 <https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/did-facebooks-faulty-data-push-news-publishers-to-make-terrible-decisions-on-video/>.

^[176] Maya Kosoff, “Was the Media’s Big ‘Pivot to Video’ All Based on a Lie?” Vanity Fair, October 17, 2018 <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/was-the-medias-big-pivot-to-video-all-based-on-a-lie>.

^[177] Owen, “Did Facebook’s faulty data push news publishers to make terrible decisions on video?”  

^[178] Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, “How Facebook’s Chaotic Push Into Video Cost Hundreds of Journalists Their Jobs,” The Atlantic, October 18, 2018 <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/facebook-driven-video-push-may-have-cost-483-journalists-their-jobs/573403/>.

^[179] Owen, “Did Facebook’s faulty data push news publishers to make terrible decisions on video?”

^[180] Kosoff, “Was the Media’s Big ‘Pivot to Video’ All Based on a Lie?”

^[181] Laura Hazard Owen, “Facebook’s pivot to video didn’t just burn publishers. It didn’t even work for Facebook,” NiemanLab, September 15, 2021 <https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-the-news-video-on-facebook-coffin/>.

^[182] Amy Castor and David Gerard, “Pivot to AI: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” Amy Castor, September 12, 2023 <https://amycastor.com/2023/09/12/pivot-to-ai-pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain/>.

^[183] Rita Smith, “Uber is a bezzle,” Road Warrior News, August 11, 2021 <https://roadwarriornews.com/uber-is-a-bezzle-doctorow/>.

^[184] Castor and Gerard, “Pivot to AI: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”  

^[185] Mia Sato and Emma Roth, “CNET found errors in more than half of its AI-written stories,” The Verge, January 25, 2023 <https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/25/23571082/cnet-ai-written-stories-errors-corrections-red-ventures>.

^[186] Karl Bode, “The AI Journalism ‘Revolution’ Continues To Go Poorly As Gannett Accused Of Making Up Fake Humans To Obscure Lazy AI Use,” Techdirt, October 27, 2023 <https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/27/the-ai-journalism-revolution-continues-to-go-poorly-as-gannett-accused-of-making-up-fake-humans-to-obscure-lazy-ai-use/>.

^[187] Karl Bode, “Sports Illustrated The Latest To Bare Its Entire Ass Thanks To Laziness, Greed, And Half-Cooked ‘AI’,” Techdirt, November 29, 2023 <https://www.techdirt.com/2023/11/29/sports-illustrated-the-latest-to-bare-its-entire-ass-thanks-to-laziness-greed-and-half-cooked-ai/>.

[188] Ronke Babajide, “How Our New Exciting AI Tools Are Accelerating the Enshittification of Our World,” Medium, November 7, 2023 <https://medium.com/the-point-of-view/how-our-new-exciting-ai-tools-are-accelerating-the-enshittification-of-our-world-3957515345c9>.

^[189] James Vincent, “AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born,” The Verge, June 26, 2023 <https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773914/ai-large-language-models-data-scraping-generation-remaking-web>.

^[190] Edward Ongweso Jr., “The Incredible Tantrum Venture Capitalists Threw Over Silicon Valley Bank,” Slate, March 13, 2023 <https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/silicon-valley-bank-rescue-venture-capital-calacanis-sacks-ackman-tantrum.html>.

^[191] Edward Ongweso Jr (@bigblackjacobin), March 13, 2023 <https://twitter.com/bigblackjacobin/status/1635302872291381248>.

^[192] Melissa De Witte, “Why are there so many tech layoffs, and why should we be worried? Stanford scholar explains,” Stanford News, December 5, 2022 <https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/>.

^[193] Cory Doctorow, “Mass tech worker layoffs and the soft landing,” Pluralistic, March 21, 2023 <https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/tech-workers/>.

^[194] Cory Doctorow, “IP,” Locus, September 7, 2020 <https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/>.

^[195] Kevin A. Carson, “How NOT to Argue Against the Existence of Monopoly,” Center for a Stateless Society, August 3, 2021 <https://c4ss.org/content/55143>.

^[196]Cory Doctorow, “America’s largest hospital chain has an algorithmic death panel,” Pluralistic, August 5, 2023 <https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/>.

^[197] Chris Stokel-Walker, “The Silicon Valley Bank Contagion Is Just Beginning,” WIRED, March 13, 2023 <https://c4ss.org/content/58364>.

^[198] Cory Doctorow, “Pluralistic: Learning from Silicon Valley Bank’s apologists (15 Mar 2023)” <https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout>.

^[199] Doctorow, “Tiktok’s Enshittification.”  

^[200] Doctorow, “Autoenshittification.”  

^[201] Cory Doctorow, “Twiddler: Configurability for Me, But Not For Thee,” Medium, February 19, 2023 <https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6>.

^[202] Cory Doctorow, “How workers get trapped by ‘bondage fees,’” Pluralistic, April 21, 2023 <https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/>.

^[203] Doctorow, “Twiddler.”  

^[204] Cory Doctorow, “Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in wage-stealing Skinner boxes,” Pluralistic, April 12, 2023 <https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men>.

^[205] Doctorow, “Adversarial interoperability,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, October 2, 2019 <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability>.

^[206] Doctorow, “alt.interoperability.adversarial,” Boing Boing, November 23, 2019 <https://boingboing.net/2019/11/13/alt-interoperability-adversari.html>.

^[207] Doctorow, “Disruption for Thee But Not for Me.”  

^[208] Doctorow, “IP.”  

^[209] Ibid.

^[210] Doctorow, “Disruption for Thee But Not for Me”; Social media platforms legal war on interoperability is ironic, by the way, considering how many of them got their start. Facebook, for example, “got its start by violating Myspace’s terms of service and building tools to help its users import their Myspace messages to Facebook….” Cory Doctorow, “Facebook threatens ad-transparency group,” Pluralistic, October 25, 2020 <https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/25/musical-chairs/#son-of-power-ventures>.

^[211] Cory Doctorow, “How to design an anti-monopoly interop system,” Pluralistic, February 5, 2022 <https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/05/time-for-some-game-theory/#massholes>.

^[212] Ibid.

^[213] Doctorow, “Autoenshittification.”

^[214] Ryan Whitwam, “Farmers are pirating John Deere tractor software to stick it to the man,” ExtremeTech, March 22, 2017 <https://www.extremetech.com/internet/246314-farmers-pirating-john-deere-tractor-software-stick-man>.

^[215] Jason Koebler, “Why Repair Techs Are Hacking Ventilators With DIY Dongles From Poland,” Vice, July 9, 2020 <https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland>.

^[216] Cory Doctorow, “Epson boobytrapped its printers,” Pluralistic, August 7, 2022 <https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty>.

^[217] Cory Doctorow, “Monopolists want to create human inkjet printers,” Pluralistic, June 10, 2022 <https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification>.

The Poverty of Right-Libertarian Cliches

Right-libertarians, it seems, have a love affair with Garrett Hardin and his so-called “tragedy of the commons.” It’s a principle to which they return, time and again. But as a foundation, it is historically illiterate; and the structure which they erect upon it is conceptually incoherent. Take, for example, Saul Zimet’s piece “The Poverty of Slavoj Žižek’s Collectivist Vision of Property Rights,” at The Freeman.

Zimet doesn’t limit his poorly reasoned talking points to the commons. He also throws in an obiter dictum at the outset, denying “that the resources being called ‘the commons’ already existed before they were ‘monopolized’ by tech entrepreneurs,” and asserting instead that “the likes of Gates and Bezos have primarily earned their wealth not by monopolizing resources that already existed, but by facilitating the creation of new technologies that have generally made the rest of the world much wealthier rather than poorer.”

This is nonsense. Zimet ignores the fact that Gates and Bezos are only needed to “facilitate” the creation of new technologies because of the enclosure of the credit commons. Because of a legal structure which limits the credit function — which properly conceived requires only a unit of account to coordinate the production streams between different groups of workers — to the possessors of previously accumulated stocks of wealth, Gates and Bezos have an artificial property claim on the right to coordinate those flows.

With this out of the way, we can pass on to the meat of the argument, such as it is. The rest of Zimet’s commentary being such a rambling hodgepodge of tangentially related talking points and ahistorical assertions, I will simply address them in the order presented.

Zimet points to a “theoretical flaw” in “the idea of broadly collectivized property [Žižek] calls ‘our commons.’”

This idea of collective ownership is often advocated by collectivists of many stripes, from socialist, to communist, to fascist, to justify confiscating the earnings of peaceful wealth producers. So it is important to understand the fundamental distinction between individual and collective ownership, and how the former facilitates widespread prosperity while the latter reliably spreads poverty and desperation to the masses.

But his own theoretical flaw lies in framing the Lockean labor theory of property as an “individualist labor theory of property” (emphasis mine).

[Locke’s] core idea has remained the central principle of the free market: in order to justly acquire something, one must produce it from previously uncultivated materials, or else receive it in a voluntary transaction or donation from someone who justly acquired it themselves….

Any divergence from this free-market conception of property rights, such as those divergences typical of socialism, communism, corporatism, feudalism, and fascism, must necessarily take the form of someone at some point being allowed to expropriate the product of someone else’s labor against their will.

First of all, Zimet ignores the fact that the historic commons of premodern Europe, similar arrangements like the Mir in Russia, or examples of Marx’s so-called “Asiatic mode” like that prevailing in India before Hastings’ Permanent Settlement, were not some free-for-all of unowned resources. They were the rightful common possession of the villagers who worked them, based on the collective labor of their ancestors who had cooperatively broken the ground for cultivation at the time of settlement.

And second, it was actually Zimet’s individual private property in land that was established by enclosers expropriating the product of peasants’ collective labor against their will. 

The idea that land titles of the modern capitalist type — i.e., land as a fee-simple commodity — can be traced to individual “labor-homesteading” of land that was previously “unclaimed,” is an ahistorical myth. Its primary function is to conceal the fact that the overwhelming majority of society was robbed of its legitimate rights in the land by a tiny minority of expropriators. 

Zimet refers to such individual private property as “free market property rights.” But in fact there is no one self-evident model of “free market” property in land. Even if we stipulate to the admixture of labor in the land, whether individually or collectively, as establishing ownership rights of some nature — which admittedly has some reason to it, from the standpoint of maximizing people’s right to their own labor-product — land and natural resources present unique problems. 

Locke himself admitted that, unlike moveable and reproducible goods created by human labor which could be treated as the absolute possession of their creators, humanity retained at least some residual common claim to the land by virtue of its fixed supply. He felt it necessary to address this special status through the so-called Proviso (that appropriators must leave “enough and as good”).

There is no model of property in land which is entirely satisfactory, in both maximizing individual rights to the labor sunk in the land, and at the same time addressing the fact that the land is a good in fixed supply and immobile from which labor once mixed cannot be picked up and carried off. There has been a wide range of libertarian approaches aimed at finding the least unsatisfactory tradeoff between these two values. I would argue that Simet’s no-Proviso Lockeanism is the worst of them; but even it treats land as a unique good to the extent that it regards simply fencing off vacant land and holding it out of use as no basis for a legitimate title, if the land is not actually developed. And even capitalist property law has at least some threshold for constructive abandonment. If we lower this threshold sufficiency, we wind up with the occupancy-and-use criteria for land title advocated by J. K. Ingalls, and Benjamin Tucker and the other Boston anarchists. Henry George and his followers attempted to separate the individual right to one’s labor in buildings and improvements from the common right to the land itself, by taxing only the unimproved site value. The community land trust attempts the same distinction by restoring the land itself as common property while retaining markets in buildings and improvements.

Zimet also frames Chinese “free market reforms” as a partial retreat from the evils of forcible collectivization by “recognizing” private property rights. This enabled “escaping extreme property” by a billion people. But his framing ignores the fact that the forced collectivization of the Great Leap Forward and the Dengist privatization policy were both violent assaults on villagers’ communal rights to the land. Naomi Klein, in No Logo, quotes Chinese sweatshop workers’ laments that, had their families not been robbed of common rights which were transferred to capitalist farmers or industrial parks, they would greatly prefer working on the land.

Before we finish, we can’t let this howler pass:

One of the sectors that still conforms to free-market principles more closely than almost any other is the tech industry in which Gates and Bezos have amassed their fortunes.

They earned their wealth largely by coming up with ideas for new technologies and business models that created opportunities and products where none previously existed. Their startup capital came partly from investment of their own hard-earned wages, and partly from others who invested in them by choice. They hired voluntary employees to build the products and operate the businesses on contractual terms that nobody was forced to accept. And when the products were built, they were sold to willing customers in mutually beneficial transactions.

That’s right — the tech sector, whose profit model depends even more than the rest of the corporate economy on state-enforced intellectual property monopolies, “conforms to free-market principles more closely than almost any other.” Never mind the enormously intrusive (not to say totalitarian) anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the constant arbitrary DMCA takedowns on YouTube, or the administrative mass seizures of domain names by the Justice Department, all based on the claim to “own” the rights to control who can replicate a string of information. Never mind the felony contempt of business model laws that Amazon’s monopoly position depends on. Didn’t happen. 

And it was other people who “came up with” those “ideas for new technologies.” It was only the enclosure of the credit function, mentioned above, which enabled them to also enclose the ideas of others for their own profit. Don’t forget, by the way, that Bill Gates — who has dismissed free and open-source software as “communist” — got his start digging other people’s code out of the trash.

As for Gates’ and Bezos’ “own hard-earned wages” — I’m not even gonna touch that one. 

Zimet comes down hard on the “voluntary,” “by choice,” “willing,” and “nobody forced them” thing, doesn’t he? That failure to ignore background violence or power relations, and to frame any transaction as “voluntary” in which there is no gun immediately present, is typical of right-libertarian ideology. In fact, the capitalists and their state have put a huge amount of work into creating a state of affairs where people “voluntarily” accept the shitty deals offered to them. People will always “voluntarily” accept the “least bad option”; the proper question to ask is, who determined the range of available options? The existing range of options reflects the foundational and ongoing state violence entailed in the capitalist system, including — among many other things — the enclosures of land, credit, and information mentioned above. As Marx might have put it, the history of their range of available options is written in letters of blood and fire.

Right-libertarian polemics are all about framing as “voluntary” a system which is based, to its very core, on coercive power relations and the ongoing threat of violence. Fortunately, they usually fail to persuade anyone who isn’t already in the choir — down-punching authoritarians who are instinctively in sympathy with the bosses and owners. And even more so than most, Zimet’s boot polish-infused prose is likely to evoke a response of “Yeah, them poor ol bosses need all the help they can get.”

My previous three essays have been step-by-step demonstrations of my thinking — each applies specific examples in detail, tailored to specific topics. To answer Andrew Kemle’s question (“Is there a self left to talk about?”) I want a general way of articulating myself. It will hardly be comprehensive, but if I can at least sketch out my thinking, that would be enough.

Kemle’s question, he feels, points to a potential issue with egoism (how can you have a concept of “egoism” without a concept of “self”?). Let me be clear then: There is no conceptual “self” at all, and no conceptual “egoism” along with it. I said I am Nothing — Écoutez-moi!

The General and The Particular

To radically simplify: egoism may be thought of as a way of diagnosing the contrast between a particular and attempts to grasp it generally (via a general, i.e., absolutes, universals, the conceptual, ideal, etc.). The general, in grasping, can assert themself as a “fixed-idea”, an idea which is “higher” (i.e., hierarchically set above other ideas and what it describes). Particulars, by contrast, are always this, this particular thing — they cannot be reduced, diluted, separated, or generalized without no longer being this. Particulars are the serfs of this conceptual hierarchy.

“Egoist” is usually an insult, someone ‘who cares only about themself’ (as opposed to what is “higher”). What are we “attempting to describe if we call ourselves ‘egoists’”? We describe how we are made to be egoists against a fixed-idea, by that very act of hierarchically grasping. Any assertion of “I”, “this”, rather than a “higher general” is an instance of egoism. (The “self”, too, can be something “higher”.) In attempting to grasp at the particular, the particular remains itself, remains an egoist. We are egoists, not in service to some conceptual “self,” but rather in every way that we fail to realize the general, that we are this. 

Egoism is “involuntary” — not because every human action somehow maps onto a vague notion of bourgeois utility, but because I am always this. To pursue “the Good” is to only ever succeed at realizing this good; to be a “good person”, I only ever manage to be this person; to want “Good”, I only ever know or want what is good for me (however I find it good for me), etc. I cannot escape my thisness. My egoism is “selfish” insofar I place “me” (“this”) over what is “higher”, over what attempts to grasp me. But this leaves us bereft of any concept of self, any way to conceive of selfishness beyond the contrast of particular and general.  All we have is the simple truism that I am this, that everything of mine is my own (realized through me).

Egoism, where it arises, expresses an irreconcilable tension. The particular cannot fully realize the general, as it always remains “this”; neither can the general fully grasp the particular, as it can never be “this”. But fixedness demands something be fully grasped, so the particular is ignored. It is the accidental to what is necessary, the inhuman to the human, the bad to the good, the irrelevant to the relevant, etc. This is what fixed-ideas must equally maintain yet systematically deny [1]. It requires a particular case to grasp, and yet cannot grasp that particular, thereby labeling it irrelevant, profane, sinful — in short, egoist. 

Here is the “Stirnerian Challenge”: Egoism — in the tension between the fixing general and its particular, that tension is either maintained or it tears itself apart.

Conceptual or Nonconceptual

Egoism is not a philosophical system; one does not identify and appease a concept like an ‘ego’ or somehow claim that one ought to ‘rid themselves of fixed-ideas’. One is not asked to take on a fixed perspective, some Bauerian-esque egoist “consciousness” (a fixed way of seeing and interpreting the world). Neither is it a theoretical system (say, psychological egoism) [2]. 

Instead, this “egoist tension” is a way of highlighting how such systems and consciousnesses falter, causing a variety of problems in ways of thinking eager for theses, theories, and dogmas (in short, fixed-ideas). In obscuring thisness, we might say that fixed theories fail to do justice to what they seek to describe. They hinder themselves. Fixed philosophies fail to justify what they seek to justify; fixed anarchies fail to escape the governmentalism they wish to attack. In each case, fixed-ideas are “problematic” (literally: they fail to dissolve the “problems” they seek to resolve or they construct new ones for themselves).  

What is the word “egoism” doing in this story? It reminds us of the “this” (“I”, “you”) permanently obscured by fixity. Further, it does so without saying what “this” is, what “I am” (to do so would entail constructing a “that”, ironically setting “this” up as egoistic against it — I am this person in this coffee-shop; if I were said to be elsewhere, one would show not a “this” but a “that”!). Even the word “Unique”, in describing “this”, refers to something totally novel every time it is used. Descriptions of the Unique, then, describe the word and its grammar (how the word works discursively, how we interact with it, how it brings the Unique into view, etc.), not the Unique. 

Dissolution or Resolution

To assert egoism is to dissolve its tension; it dissolves itself. Note how I do not say the tension is resolved. Stirner does not present another idea to counter one he is attacking with the intent of resolving the contradiction between them, unifying them into a new, third concept (a conceptual unity). It has been dissolved into a nonconceptual disunity. 

Stirner’s work is not a form of “criticism;” he does not “resolve” problems and so engage in further conceptual development [3]. Instead, he can be better thought of as engaging in a kind of Wittgenstein-esque “clarification”, identifying features of a situation that have been systematically obscured or overlooked. Egoism draws our attention to that which a fixed-idea, in obscuring, admits. This is the importance of the Spuk (“Phantasm,” “Spook”) [4]. Stirner does not say that morality must be denied because it is a “spook”, by which he means it “doesn’t exist”, is “not empirical”, or is “not objective”. Existence, empiricism, objectivity, etc., are not entirely relevant to the Stirnerian Challenge [5]. Instead, the Spuk identifies how fixed-ideas obscure “this”. 

Egoism is, in this way, a means of drawing emphasis: in drawing attention to this, one decenters an idea that has been fixed by emphasizing the excess, the multifaceted thisness of the Unique. Fixity fails to maintain itself and the Nothing comes spilling in [6].

Stirner’s approach resembles a “yes, and…” — rather than simply criticizing ideas, Stirner might be said to draw attention to the Unique that has been systematically obscured. ‘Yes, I am what I am said to be, and so I am this. I am more than what I am said to be, even if only by simple virtue of my thisness.’ The fixed-idea implies the Unique: needing (but always failing) to conceive the particular case, they are a necessary facet of conceptual development which that development must systematically deny. When no longer obscured by the “Spuk”, those facets exceed their restraints and the entire hierarchy crumbles into non-conceptual disunity.

When asserted, egoism dissolves that fixed-idea — and egoism (there is nothing “higher” against which you are “egoistic”). One is simply this, themself, their measure, cause, and value-giver. One takes all as their own, asserts their own as owner. Egoism reminds us of the presence of “I”. Reading through my previous essays, rather than saying there must necessarily be no God, or no morality, or no complexity, I am more excited to point out all of the ways that these ideas are mine. So I call the Unique “all-consuming”; “the good” is “my good”, e.g., whatever is “good” for me, however it is “good”, whenever it is “good” — i.e., no clear concept of “good” at all. And so on with every other idea I tackle.

So too does the particular dissolve. Under the rule of a fixed-idea it appears singular (an isolated, atomic individual). But now? It is this, i.e., beyond any conceptual atomism confining it. The individual gives way to the Unique, the creative Nothing after which my third essay is named. Nothing not in the sense of emptiness or abstractness, infinite re-inventability or pure freedom — but immediacy and indeterminacy, non-essentialism and ownness. The Unique lacks any center or border: it is not merely the “general” as it is always this; neither is it merely the individual “particular”, as it is always more than any singularity conceived around it. To say otherwise is to reintroduce egoism. In its full complexity and diversity it is the unknowable this, as “to know” is to know “that”. I am not a “what” but a “who”, not conceived but viewed!

Andrew Kemle notes (correctly) that “it’s hard not to think that the very notion of “I” loses every meaning that the word has carried for likely its entire existence.” I say “of course!” as, if we kept them, I would be made to be an egoist against them! It’s not just that, as Kemle puts it, I believe “any description of the world incompatible with or actively ignoring who people really are is a harmful description,” any theoretical description at all is catastrophically wrong.

Theory or Poetry

Stirner’s method may be thought of as a kind of therapy. It identifies the futile dis-ease caused by a fixed-idea, and, through egoism, identifies how that dis-ease may be dissolved [7].

To apply my perspective positively so that I do not re-assert egoism against myself, I do not seek to commit myself to theses (statements about essences and necessary truths, attempts at fixing) [8]. Building off Stirner’s understanding of names [9], I mean to articulate one particular mode of presenting my topic; drawing attention to, without drawing borders around; tying connections without obscuring differences. I want to describe poetically, without permanently obscuring (i.e., without re-constructing fixity). Even if I have not always succeeded, I mean to take into account that “any description at all is catastrophically wrong”, to not commit myself to theses of what ‘must be’ and so re-assert the egoist tension [10]. The result, I argue, is a novel tool (although I know I am not the first to notice this, and Stirner is not alone in this novelty). 

Andrew Kemle argues (and I may agree) that the word “self” is an “inaccurate and limiting abstraction,” that “the term ‘Unique’ typically emphasizes rather clear-cut separations of one thing from another.” True, but this isn’t the only thing that the word “Unique” emphasizes, it draws attention to particularity for example (and in using a word in new ways, can it not emphasize new things?). But all this is to say is that the term “Unique” is not universally practical — but I don’t claim that. I preferred “Nothing” in my third essay to emphasize my complexity and “thisness” here to clarify Stirner’s “egoism”. Yet neither is it universally practical to emphasize my “complexity” — it, too, can be a “limiting abstraction” and there may be cases where a way of perceiving myself as a single, bodily agent may be more useful. These terms’ “inaccuracy” is relevant only when they are set as a fixed-idea (such as a thesis of what is, or is essentially so) such that they obscure “this” as permanently inessential or out of focus. 

“Egoism” itself is not a fixed perspective and Stirner pains to describe the ‘joy of losing sight of oneself’. I am not forced at all to filter or perceive my world and experiences through some “egoist focus.” Egoism is merely one method to release us from fixed perspectives, highlighting a contrast between a “who” and a posited “what” such that we may be released from undue or dis-easing commitments to that “what”. It is not universally, but locally practical. It is local to the problems it dissolves. Only by extending it beyond this — letting our thoughts get away from us — does it become a Spuk, a fixed-idea. My method is not to replace one view with another but to release us from fixed views and their problems, to point to ‘ways of perceiving’ as locally practical, bringing that locality into focus. I mean to say “yes, and…” — it is not that ‘we ought never unduly universalize’, but rather that we are released from the need to. 

An Application of Stirner

This was how I meant The Anarchist and The Nothing: to see the world as my property — to say my bones are mountains and my veins, rivers — is to point, if poetically, to how a particular, environmental interest might be sparked in me [11]. The “Stirnerian” approach I use — one among many — is meant to highlight topics of potential interest, to sketch out ways of perceiving (using). I meant to construct a local way of perceiving which does not claim its own necessity or universality; a sufficiently anarchist anarchy [12].

The aim to draw attention to, relate, make useful, etc., rather than theorize is part of a difference I feel exists between myself and Andrew Kemle. I believe he misunderstands some of my point, but that’s my own fault for misunderstanding his:

I’m merely stating that if selves aren’t completely indistinguishable, then it’s rational…for a selfish person to work towards the interests of others if they want to maximize their utility, but that’s a normative statement, not an ontological one. People can act ‘irrationally’ as much as they want without that necessarily undermining the normative thrust of saying that you should act in Y way if you value X.

By recontextualizing “selfishness” (understood through an economic utility) vis-à-vis “complexity”, Kemle effectively resolves problems presented by bourgeois, conceptual selfishness. His focus is on this selfishness, as he points out, not Stirner (so my first response to him, if useful for myself to distance Stirner from accusations of anti-sociality or solipsism, is delightfully irrelevant!). 

So let me re-work my relationship with Andrew Kemle as a Stirnerian intervention on anarchy: I still believe a reliance on morality and normativity muddle the work ‘complexity’ can do for anarchism. I see Kemle’s project as a theoretical project, i.e., in some way reliant on theses and fixed-ideas, conceptual development and resolving problems. I believe he has resolved the “problems” presented by a simple, bourgeois selfishness. But, remaining within a fixed-system, asserting a normative theory, etc., his resolution remains “problematic” (as I have previously used that word). In this sense, I am not merely questioning the kinds of premises he is holding, I’m questioning their necessity. 

The point of mine I mentioned Kemle misunderstanding is that I am not saying he fails to construct a normative claim, but that this claim rests on a prior descriptive one. He says, “if you value X”, yet why do I value X? Because I am a complex subject! But — enter egoism — nobody values X, they value x (this “x” particular to them); nobody can do Y, they do y; Nobody is Z, they are z [13]. Egoism presents normativity, and all theses, with a problem much more slippery than merely skepticism or nihilism: the particularity of each case asserts itself via its own particularity (thisness); each general is particularized. These theoretical approaches are then left with the difficulty of being incapable of grasping in the way their method (theory) demands they do so; their result is doing injustice toward their subject matter, failing to apply themself meaningfully, or simply recreating what they sought to resolve.

This is how Kemle, too, might be taken to be “catastrophically wrong.” I am not saying it is factually incorrect to say that we are complex, that he is factually wrong. Neither is it universally impractical to emphasize complexity. Instead, wrongness (injustice) creeps in where a description like this transforms into a thesis, a fixed-idea, such that we can make a normative statement in the first place.  

If a person is said to be Thing A (a Complex Agent), their thisness demonstrates that they exceed their “A”-ness. Yes I am “A”, and I am this “a”, I am more than “A”. I am only ever capable of x interest, and y action; I exceed any complex interests (conceptually fixed). This egoism is not a problem for the Stirnerian, one whose descriptions don’t “get away from them”, as they are seen solely as local ways of perceiving and (while remaining this) do not permanently obscure the Unique, reasserting egoism. But it is a problem for any thesis of what ‘must be’, any assertion of a fixed-idea. Returning to my third essay: this ‘complex interest,’ when limited and shackled within a conceptual hierarchy [14], remains an oversimplification that fails to do justice to actual complexity. Harking back to my handling of reason in my first essay: Neither can we derive from it any normative claim that actually has any bite to its bark. 

If people are not (or are more than) what Kemle says they are, and are not (or more than) capable of acting the way he says they should, his normativity — even if logically coherent — is redundant. Bringing in egoism, I mean only to show this “more than”. I am not saying Kemle fails to accomplish a coherent logic of “if A then B”, “if you value A, do B”, etc. Rather, I ask if we actually “value A” and challenge people’s capability to answer his normative call in the first place if they did. I am not saying “you shouldn’t care about anyone else”: I am casting doubt on what the point of rendering that (or anything else) as a normative claim would even be for anarchists. Of course we can conclude morality from Kemle’s premise — but why would we want to? His description does not fully describe, so its normative ends don’t actually graft onto those sought to be described [15]. His emphasis is fixing, whereas I argue we do not need it to be.

Stripped of its fixity, ‘complexity’ becomes solely an object of comparison — a locally practical way of conceiving or seeing the world. But we cannot derive from this any clear notion of normativity, let alone morality. It is not a thesis of what the world ‘must be’. I don’t see much sense in anarchists rooting themselves in this style of thinking (especially not when a premise like complexity seems to lead us out of it). A normative claim doesn’t seem to be anything more than an expectation, but one with the caveat that, when not met, the failing party is categorized as a deviant. As an Anarchist, I find this suspect. But we are not stuck with this style of thinking: we can achieve Kemle’s ends without committing ourselves to fixity, and so avoid the problems normative and absolutive claims bring when we attempt to link them to anarchist ideas.

1. “Theory of Der Einzige: Stirner, Bataille, and Anarchic Abnormality.” Acid Horizon.
2. A position which, stripped of any way to define “selfishness”, Stirner renders completely incoherent. To call Stirner a psychological egoist would mean one would need to argue that he leaps from the non-theoretical truism that “my interest is my own” (I am the one who is interested, my interest is this) to the theoretical argument “my (and every) interest is of a specific kind” (that kind being whatever concept of selfishness one wishes to put forward). Ironically, I am an egoist against any thesis of psychological egoism.
3. The general is not “bad” (Stirnerians need not be critics); neither does the general “not exist” (Stirnerians need not be nihilist). Neither is the particular “all there is” (Stirnerians need not be nominalists).
4. It is a great tragedy that “spooks” have become the go-to when talking about Stirner. They are simultaneously a lot more interesting than simply “Stirner’s way of saying something doesn’t exist,” while also being an overemphasized aspect of his thinking. They are a kind of “fetishization” — similar to how Marx sees commodity fetishism as obscuring the real human labor behind the commodity, so too does Stirner see phantasmal fetishism as obscuring the actual (that which has power, capability, the multifaceted, disunified Nothing) behind the fixed-idea.
5. God may very well exist, moral realism obtain, etc. — the challenge is not to the existence of the objective, but its solubility, my ability to turn it from that into mine. I assert an alternate relationship to the objective. 
6. A fixed-idea can be thought of as a kind of picture. I mean picture both in a late Wittgensteinian sense — a concept, perspective, or mode of presenting things — but also in the sense of an actual picture (like a photograph): here, ideas and concepts are represented by the objects depicted within the image. The picture is not just the presence of those objects, but their arrangement and a particular perspective placed upon them. It serves to differentiate and structure them (a picture in which you cannot tell the foreground from the background would be a poor picture). To “draw attention to,” as Stirner does, is like increasing the saturation in a photo so that everything is white. The picture of “morality” finds itself incapable of distinguishing between any of its objects, between good and bad, etc.
7. This is how all of my previous essays should be understood. In every single essay I sought to show how each “critic” of Stirner (moral, theological, social-critical) merely fixes, a fixation which can easily be clarified and dissolved.
8. Kuusela, Oskari. The Struggle Against Dogmatism. P.175 —The statement “egoism is a tension” is not a thesis (fixed perception, perspective) about “tensions” or “egoism,” but rather describes how I will be, for the time being, using the word “egoism” and what I want to bring to focus with it.
9. “[By] christening you with the name Ludwig, one doesn’t intend to say what you are…the name is the empty name to which only the view can give content. (Stirner’s Critics, p.7)” Names may be used as vanishing signifiers, to point or show (the “view”) that which rests outside of language and concepts: the Unique, the creative Nothing.
10. Writing this essay, I have emphasized particular aspects of Stirner’s arguments, which are more complex, nuanced, and diverse than I can render here. But this is not a problem, as I seek only to draw your attention somewhere.
11. A moral environmentalism only has its propositions and arguments to articulate (and enforce) a particular environmental interest; an egoist environmentalism has as many avenues toward interest as there can be. Yes, it has many avenues toward disinterest, too, but as I argued in The Egoist: morality does not overcome the ““problem”” of disinterest.
12. The anarchism I put forward in The Anarchist I likened to that being explored by thinkers such as Shawn Wilbur — anti-absolutist; in all its senses; spilling out of its hats and boots; without ruling principles. I sought to highlight a link between Proudhonian ‘Absolutism’ and Stirnerian ‘Fixity’. Anarchism, anarchy, cannot be produced or contained by fixed-ideas. Anarchy spills out from the grasp of ruling principles; these principles cannot escape their governmentalist character.
13. “In the face of absolute reason, I am incapable of absolute reason and it cannot be expected of me.” (Part I)
14. From which we derive a normative claim or an absolutist statement (transforming a description of reality into a statement about what reality “must” be.
15. My descriptions don’t fully describe either, but they aren’t meant to.

Por Willian Gillis. Artígo original: Transhumanism Implies Anarchism, 16 de maio de 2016. Traduzido para o português por p1x0.

Quanto mais meios as pessoas possam usar para agir, mais fácil se tornar atacar e mais custosa se a defesa se torna.

É uma simples questão de complexidade. O atacante só precisa escolher uma linha de ataque, o defensor precisa defender todas elas. Isso não acontece só com pequenos exaustores termais, é também verdade sobre nosso ecossistema de softwares atuais e qualquer outro sistema com muitas dimensões de movimento. Complexidade (mais níveis de liberdade dentro de um mesmo sistema) permite uma maior superfície de ataque. Quando elas podem surgir não só de todos os pontos cardeais mas também de cima ou de baixo.

O arco da história humana tende para a nossa criatividade e curiosidade em direção a mais opções, mais formas de agir e existir. Em direção a maiores liberdades. Toda invenção humana expande imediatamente nosso número de opções de como agir.

E entrelaçada com essa liberdade é claro, vem uma maior capacidade destrutiva. Do éon quando apenas as elites podiam ser guerreiras, quando o ataque estava apenas ao alcance de uns poucos escolhidos, para uma era onde qualquer um pode carregar uma lança ou espada e matar talvez uma outra pessoa antes de morrer, para a época do mosquete e armas automáticas. Hoje, todos e cada um de nós carrega pequenas granadas em nossos bolsos e mochilas. Um subproduto acidental de armazenar energia para nossos celulares e notebooks. Amanhã o amador com uma impressora de RNA em sua garagem em Seattle vai ser capaz de fazer download ou customizar uma varíola Ebola SARS de virulência tão apocalíptica que jamais existiria através da evolução natural. Esse perigo não é apresentado por uma tecnologia em específico, ela é inerente ao próprio arco do desenvolvimento tecnológico em si. Conforme nossas ferramentas expandem nossas liberdades físicas elas forçam mudanças as nossas liberdades sociais.

À medida que avançamos no nosso desenvolvimento tecnológico acelerado (conforme o conhecimento que descobrimos e as ferramentas que inventamos tem inexoravelmente expandido nossa capacidade de ataque) nossos sistemas sociais têm evoluído também. Tiveram que mudar. De sistemas de honra para lidar comuns poucos grandes guerreiros para as primeiras democracias majoritárias onde contar cabeças um método razoavelmente preciso de determinar como uma batalha acabaria.

Conforme progredimos através do nosso acelerante processo tecnológico (conforme o conhecimento que descobrimos e as ferramentas que inventamos têm inexoravelmente expandido nossa capacidade de ataque) nossos sistemas sociais têm evoluído também. Eles precisaram evoluir. De sistemas de honra para lidar com uns poucos guerreiros notáveis para as primeiras democracias majoritárias onde contar cabeças era o suficiente pra determinar o resultado de batalhas.

Mas conforme nossas habilidades expandem nossas capacidades, a proteção das minorias e dos de baixo tem se tornado cada vez mais importantes. De mosquetes nas matas que permitiram uma minoria de insurrecionários de romperem com o Império Britânico, para bananas de “dinamite” (o “grande nivelador”, como ficou conhecida entre a classe trabalhadora em luta durante a era progressista).

Nossos sistemas sociais, nossas instituições políticas, nossa moral cívica, adaptaram-se a contragosto a esse contexto em mudança. Mas não se adaptaram rápido o suficiente.

Quando falamos de barrar avanços e mudanças que vêm sendo desencadeados pelos efeitos de retroalimentação do nosso desenvolvimento tecnológico há um compreensível desespero em nossa linguagem. Pessoal, pessoal, pessoal isso é muito importante. Isso aqui vai ser um lance. Existem riscos relacionados a isso. É melhor que a gente faça isso direito. Mas muito comumente as pessoas respondem a essas perguntas incrivelmente importantes com “nós vamos usar democracia”; sem nenhuma análise do que de fato isso significa. “Democracia” nesse contexto é uma parada cognitiva, é um slogan que nós usamos para terminar pensamentos. Pra nos dar um tapinha nas costas.

A noção de que democracia social e transhumanismo são reconciliáveis é absurdo. Democracia no sentido de tomadas de decisão por maioria é primário. Isso deriva de um contexto onde “quantas pessoas” você tem definem uma batalha. Mas  mesmo a democracia constitucional, minarquismo, o socialismo iluminado, ou a tecnocracia (quaisquer que sejam os sistemas de governo) exigem controle de uma forma fundamentalmente irreconciliável com o empoderamento tecnológico.

Controle é como a defesa. Para funcionar ele exige a supressão das complexidades, das opções, das dimensões. A tentativa de centralizar controle sobre a tecnologia é fundamentalmente iniciar uma guerra que pode ser vencida com a total destruição de quase qualquer aspecto significativo de nossas tecnologias.

David Cameron, Jeb Bush e inúmeros outros políticos, funcionários do governo e chefes de polícia no supostamente ocidente iluminado têm individualmente advogado pela criminalização da criptografia. Nós rimos deles, nós balançamos nossas cabeças e dizemos: aqui não.

Mas eu estou aqui para te dizer o que todo especialista sabe, apesar de tentarmos desesperadamente escondermos isso. Sistemas de backdoor certamente podem funcionar. Ou ao menos, funcionar para os interesses do estado. Não para nós, é claro. Mas nós não importamos quando o objetivo é controle. Quando nós não conseguimos imaginar nenhuma alternativa além do controle. Quando nossas visões se estreitaram tão dramaticamente que nós não conseguimos nem conceber outras formas de colaboração ou resolução de conflitos.

A internet pode muito bem se tornar um espaço sancionado, onde todo pacote é assinado por uma infraestrutura de servidores controlados pelo estado, de ponta a ponta à ponta. Dispositivos podem vir com backdoors de fábrica para o consumidor. Nenhuma produção permitida fora do olhar do estado. Nós ainda não estamos no ponto onde a fabricação é distribuída o suficiente para tornar a supressão ou regulamentação draconiana impossível. A abolição da computação de propósito geral é uma ameaça real. Assim como os chamados a abolição da internet. Quando se trata da internet,para as tecnologias da informação, para a dissolução da propriedade intelectual, nós geralmente dizemos que a matemática está do lado da liberdade. Mas por mais que ela comumente torne o controle autoritário mais desafiador, esses desafios podem continuar a serem superados com suficiente força, com suficiente rigidez infraestrutural, e com suficiente apoio público,

A mais virulenta das forças na crypto guerras, nas guerras do copyright e em todas outras batalhas sobre tecnologia nas últimas três décadas têm sido narrativas.

Nós estamos em muitas frentes, em muitas demografias, perdendo essa batalha.

A aristocracia tem historicamente sido anti tecnologia. E muito das explosões de filósofos continentais do meio do século vinte escrevendo laudas contra a tecnologia e ciência eram de uma tradição que sabiam muito bem que precisavam diminuir os meios tecnológicos que as pessoas tinham acesso para se manterem relevantes. Eles montaram visões orwellianas de “liberdade” que eram sobre recuar para alguma espécie de estado confinado e protegido da vida ou da “existência” humana. Sua rejeição à tecnologia se tornou uma rejeição da liberdade positiva, a liberdade de. O que eles encorajaram era: Liberdade do conhecimento, liberdade da escolha, liberdade do crescimento, liberdade da criatividade e curiosidade.

Essa corrente reacionária infiltra-se em nossa sociedade. É imensamente influente. Não deve ser subestimada.

A liberdade-para é disruptiva e complexa. Ela expande opções. E quando verdadeiramente descentralizada (dividida entre indivíduos) torna o funcionamento do poder impossível. Para qualquer ator, individual ou instituição, controlar a vasta e inconcebível diversidade e complexidade do mundo. Impossível impor regras, mesmo as “democráticas”.

Quando transhumanistas liberais ou social-democratas declaram que o que precisamos é de tecnologia “sob controle d’O Povo”, o que nunca é dito, é como exatamente esse tipo de controle supostamente deve funcionar.

Como se parece um mundo em que nós temos a capacidade de impedir uma pessoa de imprimir R-15s ? Esqueça as associações fuzzy-wuzzy de “democracia”, mesmo “democracia direta”. Pergunte-se o que de fato precisa ser feito para controlar terapias gênicas? Instalações governamentais supervisionando o uso de alta tecnologia? Imensos backdoors nos aparelhos de todos para agressivamente monitorar e limitar sua utilização? Operações policiais agressivas contra todos os hackers e curiosos? Contabilização sistemática de todo maquinário fabricado existente? Constante vigilância de qualquer um com conhecimento de como essas coisas funcionam? Controle completo de toda alocação de recursos no planeta? Essa é a única possibilidade na lógica da “social democracia” quando aplicada para aspirações transhumanistas.

Nós não podemos controlar tecnologias avançadas sem um autoritarismo tão completo que faria Hitler e Stalin salivarem em seus túmulos.

Então, o que podemos fazer?

Numa conferência anterior houve uma fala sobre narrativas de super-heróis e eu trouxe uma fala do terceiro filme dos X-Men onde o presidente diz: “Que esperança a democracia pode ter quando as pessoas podem moer a cidades com suas mentes?”.

Um rápido consenso através da sala foi: “Bem, nós precisamos de um despertar ético, uma singularidade de empatia que ilumine e refine nossos valores”.

Em absoluto. E com o quê isso se parece? Como chegamos lá? E quais são os mecanismos pelos quais tal mundo pode funcionar? Como os desacordos são mediados?

Felizmente nós não precisamos reinventar a roda. Existe um movimento há muito consolidado que têm abordado essas questões éticas e sociais, e desenvolvido respostas e análises profundas pelos últimos dois séculos. “Anarquismo” é um termo usado pelo jornalista francês Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; um repórter extremamente popular e colunista hoje comparável a Glenn Greenwald. Foi adotado como uma forma de adotar e romper o uso orwelliano de “anarquia” para representar a liberdade máxima (a ausência de poder coercitivo e relações de poder) e simultaneamente, violência caótica, a presença de competidores buscando ser governantes e relações de poder turbulentas. Esse uso duplo em que o termo “sem governo” ou “anarquia” é usado para representar relações poder fragmentadas ou em competição, tem sido usado para encerrar todo e quaisquer movimentos focados na liberdade, mais famosamente contra camponeses na guerra civil inglesa. Você quer liberdade? Nós todos sabemos que liberdade é opressão caótica e violenta.

Nessa definição, como promovida pelas elites da idade média, a própria ideia de não controlarem uns aos outros, não dominar uns aos outros, não explorar, roubar, ou violentar uns aos outros, é descartada da nossa linguagem. Num sentido prático é impossível sequer pensar sobre.

Proudhon atacou isso, retornando o termo para suas raízes etimológicas e foi o que ajudou a dar partida em dois séculos de resistência consistente e diligente ao poder.

Anarquistas nunca tomaram o poder. Nós resistimos ao autoritarismo e a opressão em todas as arenas. Desde criticarmos o marximos muito antes de suas aspirações draconianas se tornarem de conhecimento público, a lutar e morrer para resistir ao Fascismo, lutando contra Franco até que ele não pudesse se juntar a Hitler e Mussolini e liderando a resistência contra o regime nazista por toda Europa. Nós lutamos os barões ladrões, os oligarcas, e os burocratas soviéticos.

E nós fomos extraordinariamente populares em diferentes regiões em diferentes pontos da história, apesar de ainda não termos massa crítica suficiente para transformar completamente o mundo. Em toda instância onde o anarquismo surgiu para popularidade localizada com uns poucos milhões de participantes, como na Espanha, mas também na Ucrânia e Manchúria, todo poder ao redor imediatamente botou suas lutas em espera para colaborar em apagar os exemplos que nós oferecíamos, de um mundo melhor, de formas melhores de interagirmos uns com os outros e resolvermos nossas disputas, que não se voltam para o controle mas constroem um consenso tolerável para todas as partes quando um acordo é necessário.

Nós estivemos na linha de frente não apenas de tecnologias como criptomoedas e o projeto tor, mas também estivemos na linha de frente de lutas contra o patriarcado, o racismo, a homofobia, etarismo, capacitismo, etc, etc. Desde muito antes de haver uma coalizão popular como o “feminismo”. Nós traficamos armas para escravizados e publicamos jornais abolicionistas. Nós corremos através das veias da nossa sociedade, sendo pioneiros de uma miríade de tecnologias sociais como cooperativas de crédito e sindicatos. Nós consistentemente servimos como a fronteira radical da consciência do mundo, e desempenhamos um papel crítico em expandir o que é possível enquanto desenvolvendo e testando em campo novos conceitos e ferramentas.

Anarquismo (como muitos comentaristas têm notado) serviu como um laboratório da esquerda, da justiça social e movimentos de resistência ao redor do mundo. Mesmo onde nos mantemos marginais, as ferramentas que inventamos eventualmente se tornaram maisntream.

Você não precisa se perguntar como as pessoas resolveriam conflitos se todo indivíduo super empoderado estivesse carregando o equivalente a um veto nuclear em seus bolsos. Nós temos testado e desenvolvido formas sociais, estratégias avançadas de teorias dos jogos que tratam as pessoas dessa forma por questões éticas.

Nós já representamos o modelo ético mais familiar em navegar um mundo transhumano de indivíduos super empoderados. Por toda nossa ostensiva marginalidade das florestas de Chiapas ou das ruas de Atenas, nós temos preemptivamente construído as políticas do futuro pelos últimos dois séculos.

Mas oque essa experiência também tem trazido é uma apreciação pela função de sistemas de poder, suas entediantes dinâmicas de poder. O câncer sociopatico de nossas estruturas de poder não vão discretamente sumir na noite. Não vai haver nenhum tipo de despertar que fará nossos governantes de repente alegremente cederem seu poder sobre nós. Permitindo que novas tecnologias os tornem relevantes. Eles não vão sentar passivamente e permitir culturas e infraestruturas alternativas, novos mundos se desenvolverem na casca do velho. Eles sempre lutaram contra qualquer tentativa desse tipo. E nós vamos precisar combatê-los para esse futuro vencer.

Anarquismo traz determinação e clareza para o terreno onde lutamos. Quer dizer que enquanto o poder estatal pode, às vezes, assegurar algumas mudanças, quanto mais você o usa mais difícil será de dissolver esse poder em si.

Marxistas fingem que seu objetivo final seria uma utopia sem estado e sem classes, de liberdade máxima, mas os fins que eles escolheram foram incoerentes com esses objetivos. Você não pode mandar pessoas para gulags e esperar que elas sejam livres. E você não pode regular as ferramentas que as pessoas constroem enquanto mantém um compromisso em expandir suas opções em vida, para nos tornar “mais que humanos”.

Fins e meios, não são precisamente 1:1, mas eles estão profundamente interconectados. E o anarquismo (e nossa caixa de ferramentas de autonomia respeitosa e consenso) é o único caminho funcional e sobrevivível de lidar com o limite ultravioleta da capacidade tecnológica estendida, então nós não podemos nos permitir andar na direção oposta hoje. Nós devemos nos mover de maneiras que troquem o futuro por melhorias imediatistas.

Em suma, nós não podemos nos permitir dar passos para trás, na direção de maior poderio estatal mesmo nas mãos de corporações gigantes como o Google, na esperança que esses monstros que alimentamos para fazer nossas tarefas mais fáceis hoje, de alguma forma irão “desaparecer” por sua própria vontade. De alguma forma, obedecendo docilmente à medida que a tecnologia resiste e impede o poder com o qual se acostumaram. Devemos seguir o caminho aparentemente mais difícil, mas que permanece consistente. Mas felizmente uma das outras coisas que o anarquismo torna nítido é que nós não temos que erguer grandes legiões de pessoas ao nosso lado para vencermos. Uma pequena, pequena minoria pode fazer uma grande diferença, pode tornar impossível o funcionamento do controle; pode romper a rigidez e a extensão excessiva inerente aos sistemas que tentam nos controlar.Quando eu tinha treze, vesti um casaco e viajei da costa do Pacífico até as ruas de Seattle no último fim de semana de Novembro de 1999. Desde então aquele dia se tornou infame. Nossa “vitória” sobre a reunião da OMC [Organização Mundial do Comércio] se tornou folclórica de um modo em um nível perigoso, mas vale a pena destacar o desespero que sentíamos até então. Nos anos 90, conforme se fortalecia dramaticamente em poder econômico e legal, sem oposição alguma, ninguém sequer sabia da existência da OMC. A visão neoliberal que ela servia vinha direto do cyberpunk dos anos 80, do controle empresarial monopolista, onde o capital podia cruzar fronteiras livremente para retroalimentar sua força mas as pessoas eram deixadas aprisionadas em, o que de fato eram campos de escravos como Bangladesh e Eritrea. Por certo que o caso permanece. E hoje nós temos o AAT [Acordo de Associação Transpacífico] e muitas versões bilaterais. Mas todo observador concorda que a inércia desse processo foi fortemente barrada naquele frio dia de Novembro. Porque algumas centenas de pessoas lutaram nas ruas, criando tanto tumulto que aqueles processos silenciosos foram atrapalhados significativamente.

O espetáculo do protesto de rua não é, obviamente, uma panaceia, apenas uma tática útil dentro de uma contexto limitado unicamente pelo escopo do tempo. Mas ele reflete uma realidade mais ampla, de que temos várias ferramentas que usam os pontos fracos das responsabilidade super estendidas e rígidas que são inerentes a quaisquer sistemas de controle. E sua inabilidade de gerenciar a capacidade de geração de jovens estudantes nas ruas refletem com complexidade computacional permanece absolutamente crítica às questões políticas.

A era da informação tem levado ao aumento gradual da complexidade em muitas frentes através de efeitos de retroalimentação. A velocidade que a tecnologia da informação oferece a nossas mutações culturais e meméticas tem aumentado drasticamente a complexidade de todas as coisas. Pegue, por exemplo, o humor. Considere o que era engraçado em 1800, 1950, 1990, e o que é engraçado hoje. Diabos, não vamos esquecer dos 1700, nós consideravamos que incendiar gatos era uma forma suprema de entretenimento.

A complexidade da nossa cultura, nossas identidades, nossas narrativas, nossos relacionamentos, e nossas políticas têm somente acelerado. E com tamanha complexidade vem a esperança de uma reduzida capacidade de controle. Se torna muito mais difícil para políticos e anunciantes venderem narrativas universalmente poderosas. Eles já enxergam retornos cada vez menores e a diminuição da tração.

O que esse processo de acelerar complexidade representa é uma singularidade social.

Se a singularidade tecnológica é o ponto além do qual nós não podemos fazer predições ou manter controle pois a complexidade dos desenvolvimentos tecnológicos superam nossa compreensão, então a singularidade social de nossa cultura, ideias, e relações terá se tornado rica, diversa, complexa, orgânica e meta.

Certo, nós talvez sejamos capazes de criar IA, mas a maior quantidade de poder computacional nesse planeta atualmente está preso em favelas, barracos e vilas. Nós não precisamos esperar a possibilidade de uma decolagem difícil em uma década ou mais. Só precisamos libertar e conectar melhor o poder existente em nossas mentes. O anarquismo convém um rico ecossistema de trabalho teórico que seria risível de se tentar abordar de maneira resumida. Se você tem interesse por teoria de jogos e problemas da ação coletiva eu sugiro que leia Michael Taylor e Elinor Ostrom. Se você está interessado na vasta gama de deseconomias de escala suprimidas pelo histórico subsídio de violência e a tendência de mercados libertos a fins igualitários, eu aconselho ler Kevin Carson. Para sistemas legais policêntricos, David Friedman e Robert Murphy. Nós também temos um discurso incrivelmente amplo e profundo em metodologias e estratégias quando se trata do caminho ou caminhos adiante. Peter Genderloos e David Graeber têm encontrado algum renome nesse sentido.

Mas no centro do anarquismo está uma filosofia ética que busca expandir a liberdade. Seus compromissos mais famosos são políticos (a abolição do estado, a abolição das concentrações centralizadas de poder coercitivo) mas isso se estende para além, por exemplo, críticas do controle em relações interpessoais assim como críticas a rigidez ideológica. Nesse aspecto, o transhumanismo representa mais um braço do anarquismo: um foco na expansão da liberdade em termos físicos e uma crítica ao recuo tímido para uma “natureza humana” estupidificante

C4SS scholar and coordinator, Cory Massimino, was featured this past November on The Curious Task podcast, hosted by Alex Aragona. In this episode, Cory discusses prison abolition, natural rights theory, and recent movements around prison reform and abolition. It’s a great episode and digs into some of Cory’s most groundbreaking work on the prison abolition movement and the philosophy behind it.

Por William Gillis. Artígo original: Highly Derivative: Accelerationism’s Inability to Make a Clean Break, 8 de agosto 2015. Traduzido para o português por p1x0.

Atualmente há um crescente sentimento de crise na esquerda radical. Tendo se jogado em um primitivismo implícito ao longo do século vinte, agora que este barco está afundando, muitos na esquerda buscam desesperadamente uma saída.

The Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (daqui em diante também chamado de MAP), de Alex Williams e Nick Srnicek é uma de várias tentativas recentes, daqueles que resistem ao capital, de libertarem-se desse peso morto e traçar uma rota, que (nas palavras deles) estaria “em paz com as abstrações da modernidade, complexidade, globalidade, e tecnologia”. Embora falhe em chamar a atenção de radicais que estão na linha de frente, o MAP ainda assim emergiu como um documento relevante para certos círculos de acadêmicos “antiacadêmicos” com renome em círculos radicais. Em certos aspectos, os projetos dessa Esquerda Aceleracionista trouxeram uma há muito necessária lufada de sanidade. Uma voz finalmente denunciando a nudez do imperador, quando se trata da absurda preguiça e constantes negações que se popularizaram na esquerda. Como o The Accelerationist Reader, publicado um ano depois, descrevia,

“O neoliberalismo hegemônico declara que não existe alternativa, e o pensamento político consolidado na esquerda, cuidadoso em desistir das ‘grandes narrativas’ do Iluminismo, desconfiada de qualquer infraestrutura tecnológica maculada pelo capital, e alérgica a toda uma herança civilizacional que é reunida sob um mesmo nome e descartada como ‘pensamento instrumental’, patentemente falha em oferecer a alternativa que insiste, deve ser possível.”

Tendo há muito abandonado o desconexo dinossauro da organização política de massa, a esquerda radical têm cada vez mais aceito como única alternativa, um recuo consciente para a desconexão voluntária dos localismos reacionários. Mas ambas as direções são efetivamente caracterizadas por se afastarem do futuro e, se afastarem cada vez mais de toda busca pelo futuro e vigilância na busca desses caminhos. Como resultado, a esquerda como um todo tem se mostrado confusa, até mesmo traumatizada, pelas constantes mudanças do nosso mundo. Hoje ela frequentemente parece limitada a apenas embelezar as paredes de sua cela e fingir que ser “sem futuro” sempre foi seu plano desde o começo. A pouca resistência que ainda oferece, encolheu ao ponto de uma mera rejeição, uma rejeição ritualizada e uma suspeita vazia que geralmente vê a história diante de nós mais como uma tempestade a se sobreviver do que algo a ser construído. A espiral de morte resultante dessa visão, tem sido caracterizada principalmente por tentativas de recapturar sensações e armadilhas estéticas através de “obsessões reacionárias com pureza, humildade, e apego sentimental a rituais pessoalmente gratificantes de crítica e protesto e suas frágeis e fugazes formas de coletividade”. (ibid)

Mas conforme a internet veio a saturar nossas vidas cotidianas; os últimos refúgios da esquerda finalmente foram arrastados para um mundo que nitidamente seguiu sem eles. Testemunhe as tentativas histéricas de se atualizar sobre todas essas coisas de tecnologia; para garantir a todos que não existe nada capaz de destruir paradigmas no último século de descobertas científicas, ou que alguém estaria suficientemente informado apenas com algumas notas de rodapé. Frequentemente isso é comentado em termos de “cibernética”; a forma como uma certa parte enervante da esquerda tenta desdenhosamente amontoar toda ciência da computação, neurociência, teoria de jogos, etc (ou seja, virtualmente todo avanço em paradigmas científicos desde os anos 50) sobre os quais eles não foram alertados em seus cursos de graduação.

Note, por exemplo, Tiqqun estranho derretimento sobre vitalismo ou a concessão tardia do Comitê Invisível em “Aos nossos amigos” de que, talvez precisem entender todo esse lance de tecnologia, assim como a profundamente constrangedora (para todos envolvidos) tentativa de dar lições de moral para hackers no 31st Chaos Communications Congress.

Para as anarquistas é útil observar estes espasmos pois esse momento de reconfiguração vai preparar o campo para seja lá quais novas metamorfoses que estarão no futuro da esquerda. Ela é capaz de se libertar do atoleiro das polêmicas niilistas vs organizados? Ela é capaz de integrar os conhecimentos do último século e não apenas se adaptar a paisagem do presente mas se reestruturar abrir um caminho através de todas as complexidades e contextos mutantes diante de nós? Existe algo a ser salvo da esquerda não-anarquista?

Tristemente no caso do Aceleracionismo parece que teremos que continuar aguardando uma resposta. Esse modismo acadêmico passageiro talvez finalmente abra algumas janelas mas o “ar fresco” que ele traz está pesado com a poeira de cadáveres.

Mesmo em seus melhores momentos esse Aceleracionismo diz exatamente o que os anarco-transhumanistas e virtualmente todos com algum conhecimento de direção da situação têm há muito argumentado.“Nossos desenvolvimentos tecnológicos têm sido suprimidos pelo capitalismo tanto quanto têm sido promovido por ele… essas capacidades podem e devem ser libertas para irem além das limitações impostas pela sociedade capitalista”.

Mas isso dificilmente merece qualquer elogio e as falhas próprias do Aceleracionismo são bem mais preocupantes: Primeiramente, ele falha em diagnosticar precisamente as forças dirigindo o progresso dentro de nossas sociedades hoje, como sendo intrinsecamente liberatórias e portanto apresenta uma tensão falsa ou confusa onde “o ruim” deve ser intensificado para que possa haver progresso; quando na verdade o que deve ser intensificado é o bem já pressente, uma vez que seja precisamente identificado, assim como suas etapas. Segundo, ele tenta discretamente passar junto de seu repúdio ao localismo, um repúdio a construções de base (como se fossem remotamente equivalentes), e ao fazê-lo revela a si mesmo como meramente a mais recente expressão de uma certa elite acadêmica liberal que despreza a descentralização e anseia para o retorno a um contexto onde eles podem uma vez mais reinar como de facto tecnocratas.

Aceleracionismo é um velho xingamento em certos círculos e obviamente qualquer uso do termo assume que algo deve ser “acelerado”, mas pelo que observei o “aceleracionismo de esquerda” defendido pelo MAP ainda não se mostrou particularmente explícito ou assertivo sobre o que seria; exceto por alguma ideia abstrata e linguagem impressionista. E ele firmemente evita lidar com qualquer especificidade real sobre como tudo isso supostamente deveria funcionar.

“Em contraste, o aceleracionismo, fazendo uma análise diferente das forças ambivalentes em ação no capital, vai insistir no dinamismo contínuo e transformação do humano moldado pela liberação das forças produtivas, defendendo que é possível se alinhar com sua força revolucionária mas contra domesticação, e que a única maneira factível ‘para fora’ é mergulhar ainda mais fundo.”

É fácil ler isto num sentido bastante positivo, mas a linguagem é preocupantemente ampla. Embora fosse bom saber que direção “para dentro” denota, mas muito mais depende do uso de aspas em torno do “para fora”.

O que exatamente está sendo definido como aquilo do qual estamos tentando escapar? E até que ponto estamos levando isso a sério? É de se suspeitar que a falta de clareza é intencional, um movimento retórico para atrair pessoas sem de fato se comprometer com uma perspectiva. Mas na prática o que isso conseguiu foi permitir que pessoas como Benjamin Noys caracterizar essa posição como “trabalhar mais, produzir mais, consumir mais”.

Mesmo assim, os Aceleracionistas de Esquerda continuam relutantes em lidar com os detalhes ou oferecer qualquer substância. E quando passam perto de descrever como se pareceria este processo, acabam confirmando o medo de todos: despossessão ainda mais profunda, levando a algum tipo de ponto de ruptura.

Em outras palavras, precisamente a já gasta posição que todos nós sabemos que totalmente funcionou ao longo da história, como quando congoleses estavam tento suas mãos decepadas por machetes e massacrados aos milhões por feitores. A estratégia de agravar o capitalismo e seus efeitos se torna ainda mais visível e obviamente rejeitável; para criar consciência através das misérias que cria, é uma merda tipo “Punx em Hummers” e dificilmente é algo novo ou herético, e sim uma banalidade. Uma entrada particularmente insossa a boa e velha tradição de esquerdistas incapazes de conceber qualquer motivação exceto o apocalipse.

Certamente que nem todo escritor Aceleracionista comete o erro de abordar tão de perto exatamente que processo exatamente deveria ser acelerado. E alguns dizem coisas bastante banais. O MAP dedica a maior parte de seu foco explícito em desenvolvimentos tecnológicos, que, certo, são ótimos! Embora eu precise apontar que atualmente a inovação tecnológica mais significativa e criativa já está emergindo fora dos grilhões cada vez mais estreitos do capitalismo. E eu não tenho certeza que aprofundar isso para, digamos, organizando e empoderando PhDs ronins e autodidatas através de hackerspaces e centros radicais ao redor do mundo realmente reflete em qualquer coisa que se assemelha a ideia de que “a única maneira factível para fora” é mergulhar ainda mais fundo.”

Mas quando o Acceleracionist reader foi lançado o foco havia se ampliado para “acelerar [o capitalismo] desenraizando, alienando, decodificando, tendências abstrativas”. Na melhor das hipóteses esse tipo de linguagem vaga às vezes acaba se resumindo a nada mais do que apelos por mais racionalidade e estratégia; o que tristemente devo admitir, se qualifica como uma posição revolucionária. Mas há uma boa razão para se suspeitar dessa linguagem nebulosa, assim como a escolha de termos com conotações tradicionalmente negativas. Aceleracionismo tem historicamente significado o aprofundamento dos horrores do capitalismo até um ponto de ruptura fosse alcançado e isso tem inescapavelmente centrado todos outros “Aceleracionismos” ao redor desta perspectiva. Quaisquer outros argumentos que as pessoas tentem fazer, essa associação com “tornar as coisas piores” tem sido a primeira lente através da qual o Aceleracionismo tem sido abordado e está no centro de praticamente todo discurso sobre ele.

Esse posicionamento dificilmente representa um rompimento total com a putrefação primitivista da esquerda. Uma adoção entusiasmada da racionalidade, reducionismo científico, estratégia e desenvolvimento tecnológico; em resumo, as mais brilhantes expressões de nossa criatividade, vigilância, e agência, dificilmente deveria ser posta como “tornar as coisas piores antes delas poderem melhorar”.

Um dos pontos-chave aqui é que o Aceleracionismo mantém a tendência da generalização desdenhosa que é famosa na “civilização” em seu próprio uso do “capitalismo”.

Mas “capitalismo”; no senso de tendências macroscópicas da acumulação, trabalho assalariado normalizado e tendências de expectador, é radicalmente oposta a inovação e crescimento significativo. Não é uma questão de o capitalismo ter contradições internas, mas sim o fato de capitalismo e mercado serem criaturas radicalmente diferentes. A tendência acumulativa e centralizadora do capitalismo é apenas uma força entre muitas em ação em nossa sociedade, e de maneira alguma é inerentemente emergente de microdinâmicas de troca. Ainda assim, Aceleracionismo herda a tendência Marxista (que nós podemos chamar de proto-primitivista uma vez que uma tão nitidamente descende da outra) de definir vagamente a totalidade da existência da sociedade como um só monstro de firmes partes integrais e um arco teleológico mais do que um campo de batalha caótico.

Essa tendência despreocupadamente reducionista que prefere perder ideias para análises radicais é talvez a mais tóxica característica de um grupo isolado de acadêmicos de humanidades para as quais o marxismo fugiu quando já não podia aguentar uma briga com mais ninguém. Um cemitério acadêmico onde todas as crianças legais agora passeiam. Há muito eles têm sido simpáticos às tendências primitivistas da aristocracia. Como em todos ecossistemas de poder abusivos, esse enclave acadêmico é profundamente hostil a qualquer tentativa de chegar a uma objetividade ou claridade que possa vir a não deixar espaço para gaslight e não comunicação estratégica que questione dinâmicas de poder. Eles querem tudo, menos um terreno firme e universalmente acessível para os marginalizados, menos ainda a dissolução de várias escassezes de informação que constituem a escada para hierarquias sociais. Primitivismo é, em sua raiz, uma ideologia que incorpora o misticismo tão firmemente emergente na academia marxista do último século.

Qualquer afastamento total do primitivismo deve então incluir um rompimento com esses monstros de obscurantismo e anti reducionismo, e ainda assim o Aceleracionismo presta reverência submissa para muitos de seus pressupostos, implicitamente pintando a racionalidade como algo parcialmente negativo mas que ainda assim devemos nos render ou suportar. A linguagem de aceleracionistas modernos é implicitamente persistente em suas apologias, usando linguagens perturbadoras para coisas que deveriam ser empaticamente positivas:

“A única resposta política radical possível para o capitalismo não são protestos, disrupção, ou crítica… mas acelerar desenraizando, alienando, decodificando, tendências abstratas”

Mais irritante e previsível, os aceleracionistas dizem “nós devemos aderir a ciência e a racionalidade” sem nos preocuparmos em de fato fazendo um argumento de por quê. Apesar de vir de um contexto no qual os dois são amplamente demonizados! Como uma consequência é pressuposto que se deve adotar a ciência e a racionalidade por nenhum motivo em especial; como uma questão situacional ou um capricho aleatório ou é revelado que a pessoa estava esperando o tempo todo por algum tipo de permissão. E se o último é verdade então a pergunta se torna se a pessoa já estava persuadida ou porque precisava de uma desculpa? Certamente existem bons argumentos para uma adoção entusiástica da ciência e da racionalidade, então esse tipo de timidez é perturbador. Não é como encontrar o sobrevivente de um culto trêmula e hesitantemente sugerindo que “talvez, de repente quem sabe não seja uma boa comer bebês às vezes”. Com certeza você vai concordar com eles que comer bebês é ruim, mas o principal resultado dessa denúncia deveria ser nunca deixá-lo sozinho em um berçário.

É claro que podemos ser mais caridosos. E há momentos em que só queremos entregar um pouco de economia anarquista aos pobres acadêmicos desnutridos educados na tradição marxista. Afinal é fácil recuperar a linguagem do anti-édipo distinguindo desterritorialização em termos de forças de mercado e reterritorialização em termos de forças capitalistas. É certo que Deleuze e Guattari efetivamente as entenderam como parte de um todo integral, mas isso simultaneamente é, e não é verdade. Não apenas o capitalismo e os mercados refletem dramaticamente diferentes conceitos e dinâmicas estruturais, mas no mundo real e prático eles são geralmente dinâmicas separáveis ou em um sério conflito. Certamente existem formas nas quais as forças liberatórias de mercado são estruturalmente reunidas; como um tipo de combustível líquido no motor do poder capitalista/estatal. Mas existem outros aspectos nos quais a situação é bem menos sólida ou resolvida, nas quais uma força não é cooptada e escravizada pela outra, mas na qual elas são processos ortogonais ou em guerra um com o outro.

Expandindo para além do que os anarquistas de mercado chamam de “mercado”, para coisas mais abrangentes como a ciência e a racionalidade, estes fluxos desterritorializantes podem ser vistos como a emergência de uma mente coletiva; de mentes lutando para perfurar através das paredes da prisão que as mantém localizadas para uma conexão ou fusão mais fluida. Na qual o contexto de tradições, culturas, e outros entulhos meméticos são rejeitados como imposições fossilizadas, sobre a sociedade e sobre a mente individual.

Certamente sou um fã das metáforas fluidas que esse discurso oferece. Mas isso é porque refletem muito melhor as complexidades em ação. E essa realmente é a palavra operável faltando nesse discurso. Os mais importantes guias e limites faltando nesses processos são informações teóricas.

Quando o MAP declara.

“Nós talvez não estejamos nos movendo rápido, mas somente dentro de uma série de parâmetros estritamente capitalistas que em si nunca oscilam. Nós experienciamos apenas a velocidade crescente do horizonte local, uma simples investida descerebrada e não uma aceleração que seja navegacional, um processo experimental de descoberta dentro de um espaço universal de possibilidade.”

É nítido que eles estão buscando por alguma distinção crítica. Eles estão explicitamente abandonando a definição concreta de aceleracionismo em termos da segunda derivação do movimento que mais perto se aproxima do tema do projeto de Nick Land, e deixando o termo sangrar de uma maneira bastante vaga e evocativa.

Mas isso os faz perder de vista a principal questão, a complexidade. Nós certamente deveríamos ser proativamente conscientes e vigilantes em nossas explorações e agência na luta, mas essas não são distinções especialmente brilhantes. Por certo que nós podemos agir conscientemente de maneiras específicas para melhor avançar e dirigir a singularidade social na qual estamos todos participando de dentro, mas ela está invariavelmente acontecendo.

E essa complexidade do feedback cultural, memético e intelectual no centro da nossa experiência na era da internet é sua contribuição mais importante. Uma realidade que o Aceleracionismo ignora quase que completamente.

O MAP declara que “o que a velocidade capitalista desterritorializa com uma mão, ela territorializa com a outra. Progresso passa a ser contido dentro do modelo da mais-valia, um exército de trabalhadores de reserva, e capital livremente flutuante”. Mas o capitalismo definitivamente não está tendo sucesso em sua reterritorialização. Parcialmente no sentido da infraestrutura sócio-técnica que tem sido re-propositada e expandida por anarquistas mais rápido que a NSA consegue acompanhar, mas primariamente no sentido que nossa percepção do mundo tem sido catalisada em um looping de feedback de percepção e nuance que tem pressionado as estruturas inerentemente rígidas e mecanismos de poder. É aqui que anarquistas e transhumanistas têm identificado o mais fértil ponto de pressão.

No mesmo sentido de que há inescapáveis realidades materiais que limitam e determinam parcialmente dinâmicas sociais, também existem realidades computacionais inescapáveis. E isso não é um mero detalhe de por que o mercado tem visto uma explosão de interesse por radicais desde os anos 70 como um componente crítico na luta contra o poder.

Marxistas têm tido grande dificuldade com essa realidade inescapável desde Hayek e o reflexo padrão têm sido de considerar todas as “cibernéticas” como uma pseudociência ideologicamente maculadas. Mas se os primitivistas mais racionais têm razão em destacar as limitações fundamentais impostas sobre as sociedades pelas dinâmicas da energia, libertários também têm razão de olhar para as limitações fundamentais impostas às sociedades pela ciência da computação. Ambas são uma questão de física. E do mesmo modo que você não pode redistribuir os custos do carbono e fingir que os apagou, você não pode simplesmente redistribuir matérias de informação e cálculos e fingir que eles não são mais um problema.

Um projeto buscando um rompimento total com o primitivismo irracional da esquerda deveria muito bem confrontar a forma que ela sistematicamente desconsidera a complexidade computacional, muito menos sua falha em de fato se destacar e abraçar uma análise baseada nisso. A esquerda, ao contrário (com o aprofundamento da corrupção por parte do primitivismo, sempre a espreita dentro dela) tem abraçado a simplicidade. Suas tendências de gerenciamento fazendo sínteses perfeitas com a aversão primitivista a vigilância intelectual (“nós tentamos o pensamento/tecnologia antes e olha onde fomos parar”). De novo e de novo, sistemas são criticados em termos de serem “muito complexos” de serem entendidos/controlados, geralmente enquanto simultaneamente sendo diminuídos como algo mecânico mais do que orgânico. Mas a única distinção significativa entre o mecânico e o orgânico é uma complexidade fluida. Faz sentido investir contra a biosfera por ser “complexa de mais e muito difícil de ser totalmente entendida e controlada”? Com certeza não. E ainda assim quanto mais orgânico, quanto mais complexo e fluido o mercado é, nossas tecnologias ou nossa cultura se tornou, mais os marxistas entram em parafuso. Nós deveríamos aprofundar a vibrante, rica, e exuberante complexidade da inter-relação nos tempos da internet, não apenas porque conforme fazemos isso estruturas de poder como o estado e os gigantes do vale do silício vacilam e se encontram cada vez menos capazes de exercer controle, mas por causa de tal complexidade é inextricavelmente ligada a expressões e experiências de libertação.

Para desatar os fluxos de desejo liberatório em nosso discurso, economia, etc não devemos nos voltar para o que há de horrível e dobrar a aposta, mas resistir a isso.

Como um sobrevivente de um culto, Aceleracionistas constantemente insistem que “não existe saída”. Mas a verdade é que é bem provável que haja uma saída da situação atual em termos localistas, luditas ou anti racionalistas, e que uma saída em direção ao primitivismo é o que o poder quer.

O foco neoliberal em crises e os crescentes apelos do capitalismo como uma forma de achatar e reduzir a complexidade da sociedade são elementos que vão no mesmo sentido. Quando os modos normais de gerenciamento se tornam insustentáveis, o poder geralmente volta a simplesmente bombardear sua própria população na esperança que a destruição apocalíptica traga a situação de para uma escala uma vez mais, mais controlável.

O que estamos vendo de fato, com o desaparecimento gradual do primitivismo, é a virada raivosa do capital e do Estado contra a inovação tecnológica e as tecnologias da informação. Vide as sinistras imagens de políticos e chefes de polícia clamando pela proibição total de criptografia e da internet. E a hostilidade deles para com qualquer coisa que se pareça com mercados livres das correntes do capital é, certamente, uma antiga tradição. O poder abomina complexidade.

Ainda assim, aceleracionistas de todas as espécies compartilham uma triste tendência de considerar o mercado e racionalidade como um tipo de morte. É preciso se livrar dessa bagagem. E a rejeição ou ignorância deliberada com relação a problemas de cálculo que derivam do mercado (a teimosa tendência de continuar retratando o mercado como uma coisa “mecânica” morta ou como criadora de morte invés de ser fundamentalmente orgânica em violenta luta contra a morte mecânica do capital) leva a abraçarem soluções centralizadas, simplistas e inorgânicas como a “renda básica universal”. Hoje em dia, todo mundo compartilha alguma simpatia pela renda básica universal (certamente ninguém deveria ter que trabalhar para viver), e pode ser que esquemas de renda básica sejam reformas úteis, mas remediar as escassezes artificiais (ou seja, violentamente simples) e concentração de capital da nossa paisagem infernal do nosso presente através da imposição de um recurso ainda mais truncado é uma abordagem perigosa para dizer o mínimo. E a sua defesa acrítica inexoravelmente leva a uma caminho autoritário.

O MAP tristemente redobra a aposta nesta opção, abraçando tanto uma práxis quanto uma imagem artificialmente simples do capitalismo como um atrator no espaço fásico das relações humanas, basicamente com alcance universal:

“Nós acreditamos que qualquer pós-capitalismo exigirá um planejamento pós-capitalista. A fé posta na ideia de que, após uma revolução o povo vai espontaneamente constituir um novo sistema socioeconômico que não será um simples retorno ao capitalismo é inocente na melhor das hipóteses, e ignorante na pior delas.”

Como radicais buscando por visões de um mundo melhor, devemos de fato buscar mapear o possível, para explorar os caminhos adiante e dinâmicas alternativas, para melhor entendermos o relevo e nossas opções, em qualquer contexto possível, não apenas no presente. Mas “planejamento” carrega em si um legado bastante específico de chiliques furiosos contra a complexidade, de comunicados esnobes de supremos comitês da falta de imaginação. Caminhos verdadeiramente radicais devem ser trilhados de baixo para cima, não do grupo de leitura da Jacobin pra baixo. Planejamento pressupõe controle sobre o que é possível. Isso implica começar de um bloco de granito e esculpir uma figura previamente visualizada, invés de deixar o caminho para um objetivo mais fundamental, responder fluidamente e se adaptar ao que é possível. Planejamento não reflete uma navegação criativa mas mais da velha necessidade marxista de impor uma ordem teórica arbitrária do que de fato fazer investigações científicas.

De verdade. Eu juro por deus que não estou inventando isso, o próprio MAP cita de forma positiva o Cybersin. Somos tentados a relevar e imaginar o aprofundamento da esquerda no primitivismo dos últimos cinquenta anos como um tipo de visita a Nárnia, de onde os sobreviventes agora emergem ainda vestindo calças bocas de sino e se perguntando que horas vão servir o jantar. Mas na realidade não há desculpa para esse tipo de ciência da negação: “O fato que ambos foram absolutamente malsucedidos pode ser traçado até as limitações políticas e tecnológicas sob as quais esses primeiros ciberneticistas operavam”. Eu não consigo conceber o extenuante esforço mental que deve ser necessário para levar essa desculpa a sério. Ou talvez “sucesso” esteja sendo medido não em termos de desejos de subjetividades ricas e diversas de seres humanos, mas em termos de algum parâmetro truncado e medido contra algum capitalismo de estado zumbi contemporâneo ao Chile dos anos 1970. Prontamente assumo que uma Cybersin moderna deve ser capaz de construir um socialismo capaz de evitar as fomes em massa da União Soviética, pois as variáveis da produção de comida são relativamente pequenas comparadas com tecnologias avançadas e a constante relativa da fome humana e suas necessidades nutricionais.

Como eu gostaria de poder dizer que o giro autoritário do MAP está limitado a escrever fanfics duvidosas sobre Allende e sua ponte de comando do Star Trek, mas o MAP muito nitidamente quer descartar qualquer coisa que se pareça com horizontalismo ou descentralização juntamente do localismo.

“Segredos, verticalidade, e exclusão, todos esses também tem seu lugar em uma ação política efetiva… Nós precisamos propor uma autoridade vertical legítima controlada coletivamente, além de formas de sociabilidade horizontais distribuídas, para evitar que nos tornemos escravos de um centralismo totalitário tirânico ou de uma ordem emergente caprichosa fora de nosso controle.”

…O que eu tenho absoluta certeza vai funcionar pois como nós já estabelecemos esse universo ficcional é mágico.

Não é inteiramente nítido oque está acontecendo aqui. Os autores estão acriticamente engolindo a declaração ridícula de que a única mídia para o antiautoritarismo e resistência à expansão do poder estatal seria um ludismo localista? E de alguma forma eles estão confundindo a expansão do poder estatal com o feedback da aceleração do desenvolvimento tecnológico? Qualquer que seja o caso, essa análise não é mais uma rejeição da ideologia primitivista do que deixar crescer um bigode de vilão e ir trabalhar para uma empresa de frakking.

Por fim ficamos nos perguntando se o impulso autoritário é a força motriz ou se os autores, como acadêmicos, estão tão iludidos por seu status de classe que quando pressionados por caminhos adiante eles são incapazes de imaginar outros meios que não estabelece uma “infraestrutura intelectual” ou vanguarda de elite (completa com pedidos de think tanks financiados por governos, acredite se quiser) para dirigir isso. Qualquer um que diz estar se livrando da infecção primitivista do século 20 enquanto nunca engaja com o anarquismo, é um falsário, e agora a era da internet leva todos a se entenderem como intelectuais. Uma vez mais os aceleracionistas demonstram a mesma tendência primitivista e estatista de suprimir a complexidade, invés de abraçá-la.

Se de fato, como declara o MAP, “o sectarismo é o último suspiro da esquerda”, então eu digo que nós deveríamos ter tanto sectarismo quanto fosse possível. Se algo deve ser acelerado, que seja o sectarismo. Um sectarismo fractal até que o cadáver da esquerda finalmente seja dissolvido e o anarquismo liberto. Desenvolvendo um ácido forte o suficiente para dissolver suas estruturas de poder apodrecidas sempre foram um pré-requisito para corroer o capitalismo e o estado. Somente nossa timidez invertebrada tem nos impedido.

Mas é certo que não deveríamos nos surpreender pelos Aceleracionistas de esquerda abraçando o elitismo administrativo, é palpável a fome deles, por uma tecnocracia das humanidades acadêmicas. E com virtualmente todo discurso derivado de Marx, o objetivo nunca foi de fato alcançar um mundo melhor.

O termo aceleracionismo tem uma longa história e ainda assim aparece somente em escritos acadêmicos e nunca em aplicações do mundo real. E é (nós devemos falar do elefante na sala) fundamentalmente uma posição acadêmica. Ininteligível, fora do discurso da filosofia continental que é inextricavelmente uma expressão de classe. Puro elitismo da classe burguesa acompanhado de uma falta de sinceridade ou reducionismo/radicalismo. Uma arena onde o obscurantismo entusiástico tem encorajado o surgimento de novas hierarquias, novas ecologias de relação de poder, jogos de posturas competitivas através de nuvens masturbatórias de linguagem absolutamente desprendidas de qualquer significado real.

Esse discurso ou comunidade não é apenas relativamente desconectado das ciências, ele emergiu em grande parte de uma necessidade desesperada de se definir em contraste às ciências. E está parcialmente inclinado a ter como resultado a perpetuação de lentes antiquadas, mais do que recomeçar ou drasticamente restruturar uma análise. Num sentido muito real, as teorias e os modelos nunca morrem no discurso continental; as humanidades a que se refere defendem um sistema de notas e mais notas. E assim, diferente das ciências, apresenta um sistema inerentemente elitista. Ele cria e fetichiza economias artificiais de capital intelectual, forçando as pessoas a se arrastarem por um cânone em constante crescimento sem jamais simplificar os argumentos novamente e fazendo uma reestruturação adequada. Excelente para o hipster acadêmico que quer tratar análises sociais como quem monta uma coleção de discos (o burguês de vinte e poucos anos surfando tendências boêmias e procurando por opiniões pra defender em jantares onde os talheres ficam em jarros de vidro). Mas enquanto essas tradições têm influenciado fortemente o método performático do ativismo como uma fase pessoal e/ou como moeda de troca para a formação de uma comunidade que caracteriza muito da esquerda moderna, eles tem absolutamente zero impacto nas ruas.

A realidade é que (a realidade que os Aceleracionistas o resto da esquerda em convulsão estão obviamente respondendo) as pessoas que hoje corajosamente desbravam o futuro não são intelectuais continentais e pós-graduados em ricas universidades de arte. São anarquistas hackers e quem faz ação direta. Ou cientistas e engenheiros.

Eu suponho que é okay, que algumas pessoas dentro da tradição continental completaram o longo arco de volta a racionalidade e a uma “modernidade” rigorosa, mas enquanto vocês estavam fora nós estávamos botando as coisas pra funcionar. E eu não tenho tanta certeza de que vocês têm muito para contribuir no momento. Além de manter as portas abertas para outras pessoas presas no mesmo discurso buscando escapar dessa barca furada.

Há uma profunda diferença entre radicalismo e esse tipo de travessia infinita de redes, e análises de círculos sobre círculos que frequentemente é necessário para se ter uma ideia de um fragmento do terreno dos discursos que se sobrepõem às dinâmicas complexas mais fundamentais. A última pode rapidamente crescer de maneira cancerosa, refletindo o tipo de coisa que David Graeber expôs com obsessão profissional, a chamada “profundidade interpretativa” mais do que relevância factual.

Teóricos Aceleracionistas geralmente são de genealogia marxista e por isso acompanham a tendência marxista de falar em termos de macroestruturas nebulosas ou epifenômenos em larga escala, se recusando a lidar com a ética intrínseca. Isso é parte de uma tendência irritante mais ampla de tentar chegar a conclusões normativas de instituições em resposta a certas impressões generalistas mais que qualquer tipo de orientação ética fundacional. Como tanto do discurso esquerdista/primitivista eles parecem incapazes de formular qualquer tipo de apelos éticos que não giram em torno de intuições óbvias. Veja por exemplo o modo de argumentação dominante na esquerda atual em que algo é comprovado como negativo por sua capacidade de ser associado de alguma maneira nebulosa com grandes vilões como imperialismo ou sexismo. Quão tênue ou irrelevante é essa conexão, dificilmente importa. Nós temos um conjunto de impressões vagas do “capitalismo”. Esse conjunto é ruim. E, por isso, tudo o que pudermos associar a qualquer aspecto desse conjunto é igualmente ruim.

A maioria de nós consegue reconhecer quão absurdo esse modelo de argumentação é quando nos deparamos com ele, mas ainda continua tendo um apelo insidioso para aqueles doutrinados com a hostilidade para com o reducionismo. Perguntar “o que exatamente são os problemas específicos no centro dessa imensa gama de coisas que estamos chamando de capitalismo?” é um ato de sacrilégio. Onde tradições mais radicais buscam separar as palavras em conceitos distintos e identificáveis, os continentais corretamente entenderam que esse tipo de claridade acabaria com o jogo aristocrático de boa parte das humanidades.

E mesmo assim, uma e outra vez essa orientação continental leva (apesar de se dizer antiessencialista) leva a tentativas reacionárias de determinar e integrar algum tipo de “natureza humana” ou “experiência humana” irredutível, que pode realmente ser desconstruída ou reconfigurada, e portanto não tem latitude real.

Não é um detalhe estranho que o filósofo continental Nick Land é tanto uma figura fundadora da Direita Aceleracionista moderna e do Neorreacionarismo. É precisamente suas raízes continentais que permitem a fundação de tal fascismo. Formar um modelo de mundo através de uma análise tão abstrata e macroscópica e abraçando as primeiras explicações e narrativas que surgem invés de olhar mais profundamente por formas de reformular e mudar as coisas é exatamente o polo oposto ao radicalismo. Mesmo nos momentos em que é adotada a linguagem concreta, o impulso reacionário têm sido consistentemente fazer afirmações rápidas sobre oque é, e ignora todas as outras explicações possíveis. É nítido que neorreacionários como um todo vêm de muitas direções, alguns são ex-transhumanistas que se afastaram de tanta tecnologia quando perceberam as conclusões inescapavelmente liberatórias de dar às pessoas mais meios, mas o projeto de Nick Land é muito certamente mais um que permanece nas piores tendências da filosofia continental. E nós não deveríamos nos surpreender. O termo aceleracionismo carrega uma história niilista, um contexto que Land e outros escritores aceleracionistas estão conscientemente reivindicando.

Niilismo, assim como Deus, libera um stress por em suma, agir como uma parada cognitiva, uma desculpa perfeita para cessar o pensamento; para ser desesperadamente invocado mais do que se pensar a respeito. E por isso herda ou forma loopings de feedback arbitrários para proteger esse estado de morte cerebral. Entre os neorreacionários isso encontra expressão através de sua fome pelas formas mais rápidas de encontrar modelos. Invocando a ciência cognitiva para “explicar expulsando” mais do que fazer investigações radicais. Tudo pode rapidamente ser desconsiderado como mera sinalização, ou ritual, ou QI, ou raça, ou oque for. Buscando por dinâmicas apenas até onde podem rapidamente criar taxonomias ou histórias simplistas para jogar sobre as coisas e impedir quaisquer explicações que podem levar a hipóteses que competem ou possibilidades radicalmente novas.

Em contraste a esse reacionismo é possível que tenhamos uma postura que abraça em vários níveis a “desterritorialização” e os “fluxos libertos” (não como uma posição niilista que desiste e aceita qualquer caminho por onde seja carregado) mas em seu lugar, uma posição de Vigilância Total. Tal vigilância é em última instância a única coisa sólida na paisagem conceitual ou computacional; mais como uma posição do que como um argumento. Certamente não é um abismo. Para a vigilância significar um nada infinito é preciso adotar uma posição de niilismo na qual todos argumentos e perspectivas são igualmente mapeáveis um sobre os outros, uma vez que você descarte todos os apegos arbitrários. Que não há metaestrutura ou pontos universalmente únicos em fluxos de meta-desejo. Tal situação perfeitamente plana seria sem dúvidas absolutamente ordenada e portanto dificilmente uma topologia aleatória, mas os niilistas se agarram a essa ilusão de planificação ou falta de sentido como uma desculpa para recusar qualquer esforço de exploração vigilante. Para apenas permanecer em quaisquer instintos ou impulsos que eles estejam pendendo sem muitos questionamentos. Às vezes isso leva a vários indivíduos exaustos coletivamente tentando se agarrar a amizades e armadilhas estéticas de suas antigas vidas anarquistas. Em outros momentos isso leva a nerds neonazistas falando sobre como brancos e homens “alpha” vão reinar após o colapso da civilização. Em todos os casos a rendição é de um localismo conceitual; vagando em círculos espontaneístas ou permanecendo em uma posição meramente porque você reside lá e despreza qualquer viagem mundial ou exploração diligente como perda de tempo. Ambos são capturados no vácuo de uma rejeição cada vez mais irracional do universal, do cosmopolitano, do genuinamente curioso.

Cito a pior das mutações da Direita Aceleracionista pois não estou convencido que o Aceleracionismo de Esquerda pode ser separado de seu lado sombrio. Não estou convencido de que ele consegue de fato traçar um rompimento com o primitivismo que praticamente define a esquerda hoje sem romper com muito da bagagem da tradição continental e marxista. E ainda assim não é nítido o que sobraria do Aceleracionismo sem essa bagagem.

Por exemplo, a noção de “alienação” que geralmente é tão central em textos aceleracionistas é, francamente, quase sempre, uma mera impressão evocativa. Tudo é alienação: Um universo sem alienação de qualquer tipo seria um universo vazio e homogêneo, sem diferenças. Mesmo se voltássemos para uma suposta versão mais concreta e tradicional do marxismo, ficamos tentados a berrar que nem o artesão pré-capitalista, nem o trabalhador da fábrica capitalista deveria necessariamente escolher entre se identificar psicologicamente com os produtos de seu trabalho em primeiro lugar. E ainda assim, é claro que a “natureza humana” é invocada.

Eu suspeito fortemente que é impossível definir “alienação” de forma concreta com qualquer tipo de substância enquanto ainda guarda semelhanças com como o termo é usado hoje. Me sinto muito mais alinhado com a abordagem relativamente indiferente do Manifesto Xenofeminista: “okay nós estamos alienados, mas em algum momento nós NÃO estivemos?”. Nós nunca tivemos muita agência em nossas condições, materiais ou sociais. Homo sapiens, como todas as criaturas, sempre foram forçados a fazer coisas. E o conto melodramático de um estado ideal que foi perdido é reacionário.

E ainda assim, se você apontasse uma arma para minha cabeça e exigisse que eu conjurasse uma definição para a palavra “alienação” eu provavelmente preservaria suas conotações negativas. Entretanto eu poderia argumentar que as correntes do desenvolvimento tecnológico e engajamento em movimento em nossa sociedade hoje estão minimizando, não acelerando a alienação. E “condições naturais”, ou o primitivo homo sapiens caçador coletor (não importa o quão integrado ao seu meio ambiente) ainda representa um incrível grau de alienação. Até porque, nossas redes neurais estão profundamente aprisionadas dentro de nossos crânios. A forma humana padrão permite apenas o mais ínfimo dos canais de interagirem com o universo mais amplo. Nesse cenário a riqueza e complexidade do nosso entendimento e capacidade de reconfigurar a nós mesmos ou nos comunicarmos uns com os outros não é nada mais que um aprofundamento da alienação. Ciência e tecnologia, em última instância, reduzem a alienação. Sem técnicas e ferramentas não haveria como ampliar a profundidade, imediatas e enraizamento para nosso engajamento com o universo. Tecnologia/linguagem, por exemplo, expandem a largura e escopo de nossa capacidade de nos comunicarmos uns com os outros, uma longa e lenta escalada cujo cume pode ser entendido como telepatia eletrônica ou a fusão de mentes.

Mesmo discutir tais aspirações ou dinâmicas seria, é claro, parecer loucamente fora de lugar no discurso Aceleracionista, que quer manter distância suficiente do transhumanismo para evitar ser visto como sincero e não tão maneiro. E basicamente é esse o problema. Não há nada de novo aqui, só uma tentativa meio chorosa de justificar um retorno a relevância que no fim do dia está mais preocupada com parecer legalzona para seus pares do que de fato retornar a relevância.

Aceleracionismo, em resumo, o velho e antiquado marxismo e todo lixo continental. Uma mistura isolada de elitismo e correntes anti intelectuais de localismos e imediatismos inerentes a aquelas visões com as quais eles agora reivindicam terem rompido.

Quando Williams & Srnicek publicaram o MAP, minha primeira leitura foi cheia de “sim, mas é óbvio” em certos pontos, temperada com uma raiva por sua falta de coragem de ir além. É uma posição natimorta, quase certamente destinada a morrer em um canto da acadêmia como uma moda quase interessante. E nenhuma enchente de trabalhos a seu respeito podem lhe dar vida.

Há um senso generalizado por muitos hoje de que o futuro “está vindo até nos”, como um trem para uma donzela amarrada nos trilhos. Na melhor das hipóteses o Aceleracionismo de Esquerda nos oferece a esperança de que nó podemos reverter a identificação da inércia neste retrato e revigorar nas pessoas o senso de que nós é que estamos acelerando para o futuro. Na pior das hipóteses, entretanto, o aceleracionismo apresenta um tipo de rendição niilista ou uma visão de uma esquerda autoritária e elitista que pode ainda sobreviver através do parasitismo. Ao ligarem-se à racionalidade, à tecnologia, etc., para manter alimentado um espaço sedentário e estupidificante de “vida humana”; o tema de tantos discursos continentais, agora postos como camada sobre camada de lixo endurecido que seus praticantes relutantemente começam a esfregar, e ao fazê-lo admitem seus fracassos

As vertentes da esquerda dispostas a abandonar o seu casamento com o primitivismo continuarão, sem dúvida, a procurar um caminho a seguir. Uma correção de rumo capaz de os arrastar para a era pós-Turing. Fico à espera desse dia. Entretanto, fazendo mal uso Nietzsche, a verdade é que não vimos nada ainda.

 

 

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Karl Hess: A Life on the (Right) Left (and Right)

Introduction. Focus of This Paper

Over the past decade or more, I’ve done a considerable number of C4SS studies on particular anarchist thinkers. Since my formal titles at Center for a Stateless Society include Karl Hess Chair of Social Theory, it’s probably well past time to do one on Hess.

Karl Hess’s intellectual career is a long arc from the Old Right through the mid-60s, to the New Left, and back to the right starting in the late 70s or so. In his Old Right phase, he was associated with William F. Buckley in the early days of the National Review, “worked closely with Joe McCarthy” (including writing his speeches), and was also on the staff of the American Enterprise Institute. Working for a union-busting consultant, he wrote pamphlets “exposing any known Communist Party or Communist-line association of anyone involved in a local organizing effort.” He was chief speechwriter for the Goldwater campaign and principle author of the 1960 and 1964 Republican platforms.^[1] In his New Left period he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, had friendly ties with the Black Panthers, and worked at the Institute for Policy Studies. He went on in the 1970s to a prolonged period of involvement in the community and alternative technology movement — an interest that never left him, even after his return to the right.^[2] In the 80s he returned, in his own words, “back to my roots as a classical liberal,” at one point editing a periodical for the Libertarian Party (which had itself, of course, moved considerably to the right since its founding).^[3]

The extent of his shift back to the right in his later years is evidenced by his passionate defense, in retrospect, of McCarthyism. McCarthy, he said “was not… wrong. There was a Communist menace. He helped create the atmosphere in which important parts of it could be exposed.”^[4] It’s also suggested by the fact that Charles Murray — of The Bell Curve fame — wrote the Foreword to his autobiography, and that Hess cited him as his beau ideal (“thinkers of the caliber of Charles Murray”) of a social thinker.^[5]

Surveying his earlier leftist views from the perspective of his 60s, he referred to them as “madness,” repudiating them in the clichéd language of the right-wing commentariat (“politics of envy”),^[6] and dismissing left-wing economic theory in the kind of superficial terms that might have come from a Townhall columnist. For example, his framing of “the labor theory of value in action”:

Suppose that you want to have a table painted. Someone comes along who says he will have the table painted for $100. Finding people who want things painted is his business. The price seems fine to you and the deal is made.

The person who agreed to have the table painted, according to Marx, is a capitalist, because he did not mean to paint the table himself. He was arranging for someone else to do the actual physical labor. He would put up the capital (money) to get the job done, but would not do the actual work.

He spends ten dollars to buy the paint and brushes that will be needed to paint the table. That money, used for starting-up costs, is called capital. It is money that people have saved out of work they did in the past.

The capitalist finds an unemployed person who will be happy to paint the table for $50. The deal is made. The table is painted. The painter receives $50. The capitalist has already spent ten dollars for material, so he pockets $40 in profit….

Marxism claims that the capitalist should have no role in this affair, and that he doesn’t deserve a penny. yet the unemployed person who actually painted the table is now $50 richer. The man who wanted the table painted now has a painted table, for a price he was willing to pay. And the capitalist is paid $40 for having ensured that these satisfactory events should have taken place.^[7]

He also denounced a strawman caricature of “America haters” using the demagogic rhetoric of a Spiro Agnew: “Where else on the face of the earth would these unthinking critics want to live?”^[8]

For anyone familiar with my own previous work, it should come as no surprise that I associate Hess’s most valuable contributions with his middle period; it will, accordingly, be the focus of this study.

I. Rumspringa

In the period following Goldwater’s defeat and the purge of Goldwaterites from the Republican Party, Hess spent some time spinning his wheels. He took up motorcycles, lived for a while on a houseboat, and learned welding as a way of making a living — as well as keeping his bikes operational and his houseboat afloat.^[9]

During this early post-Goldwater phase, he spent several years undergoing two concurrent and mutually influencing ideological transformations. For much of this time he saw the two trends as more complementary than conflicting.

First, he came under the influence of Murray Rothbard and adopted the anarcho-capitalist ideology.

He was present for the annual YAF convention in August 1969, in St. Louis, where the formal split and walkout of the classical liberal faction was the beginning of a movement that led to the formation of the Libertarian Party.^[10] According to Jeff Riggenbach, Hess “helped Rothbard try to steer the libertarian students who walked out of the convention en masse into their left-leaning, anarchist-friendly Radical Libertarian Alliance instead of the more Randian and minarchist Society for Individual Liberty.”^[11]

Samuel Edward Konkin III — a witness to the events, and as a self-described “left-Rothbardian” whose primary political inspiration was the ca. 1969 Murray Rothbard at his point of closest cooperation with the New Left — recounted that the laissez-faire secessionists from YAF were joined by libertarian socialist refugees from YAF, in laying the groundwork for what would become the Libertarian Party.

In 1969, both the SDS and the Young Americans for Freedom split at their respective conventions.  The “right” Libertarians from YAF joined the free-market anarchists from SDS at a historic conference in New York over Columbus Day weekend, called by Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess.  In February of 1970, several activists working for Robert LeFevre organized an even bigger conference in Los Angeles at USC, which included Hess, SDS ex-president Carl Oglesby, and just about every big name in the Movement up to that point.  I attended both, as well as the YAF Convention in St.  Louis before.

After L.A.’s conference, campus Libertarian Alliances sprung up around the country.  I personally organized five in Wisconsin during 1970 and a dozen in downstate New York (New York City and environs) from 1971-73.^[12]

Elsewhere, Konkin wrote: “[Jerome] Tuccille… joined Rothbard and others in the early pre-St. Louis attempt to create a Libertarian movement out of YAF and SDS chapters, the Radical Libertarian Alliance (RLA).”

In February 1970…, the California Libertarian Alliance hosted the Left-Right Festival of Mind Liberation at USC. Nearly 500 activists showed up to hear LeFevre, SDS former president Carl Oglesby, Hess, Rohrabacher, SEK3, and most of the early activists. Press coverage of libertarians (such as the con coverage in the LA Free Press) was growing, peaking with the 1971 color cover on the New York Times Magazine (see below).

Libertarian Alliances… spread to every major campus during 1970.^[13]

It was in this general period, March 1969, when his article “The Death of Politics” appeared in Playboy. It contributed immensely to the ideological culture of the early Libertarian Party.

Meanwhile, starting sometime in the mid-1960s, Rothbard had become increasingly intrigued by the New Left and its possible affinities with his Goldwaterite positions. At some point he entered into a dialogue with the Institute for Policy Studies, beginning an evolutionary process that eventually led to a near full-blown adoption of the New Left ideology.

Establishing an actual chronology correlating the two ideological trends requires a fair bit of detective work and educated guessing. Hess gives no specific dates in Mostly On the Edge, either for the initial feelers from Raskin and Barnet or for his more formal collaboration with the Institute for Policy Studies. Just based on the internal logic of the text, one might get the impression that his dialogue with the New Left started pretty early on following the Goldwater defeat. But Hess provides few specific dates for the period between the 1964 election and the events at the 1969 YAF Convention, and all the material concerning his welding and biking interests, Rothbard and anarcho-capitalism, and the New Left and IPS, is quite jumbled. It might well be a conflation of events in that time period either as a result of his unreliable memory at the time of writing two decades or more later, or of his son’s attempt to put Karl Sr.’s notes into chronological order.

In Dear America, he states that in the 1968 election year he was already a member of Students for a Democratic Society,^[14] whose Port Huron Statement he had found congenial — suggesting that the period of political introspection during which his later New Left conversion gestated was already well underway.

Despite his SDS membership, however, the consideration of left-wing ideas would appear to have been mostly subliminal. This is doubly so, considering he agreed to work on Goldwater’s Senate campaign (on the condition that he not be required to write in support of the Vietnam War or “law and order” issues).^[15]

The beginning of Hess’s association with the Institute for Policy Studies is hard to nail down. For one thing, it depends on exactly what we mean by “association.” He appears to have gone, over a period of years, from quite informal initial contacts to formal membership.

The introductory material in Mostly On the Edge includes a chronology that gives the dates for “Joining the Institute for Policy Studies” as 1968-1970,^[16] but it’s not clear whether the chronology is Hess’s own or his son’s attempted reconstruction, or whether 1968-1970 is meant as a range of possible dates.

The internal logic of the actual text seems to suggest an early start to Hess’s interaction with the IPS and his interest in the New Left. Milton Kotler, in Final Impressions, states: “When I was at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C., Prometheus appeared in 1965 in the person of Karl Hess.”

Marc Raskin, IPS director, had learned about this notable 42-year-old figure, who came from the right wing to the left wing in a flash of time after the defeat of Barry Goldwater… in the 1964 election. Marc invited Karl to join us as a visiting fellow….

At the IPS seminars Karl propounded anarchist and libertarian theories and practices, chief of which was his refusal to pay federal income taxes….

Along with others…, Karl and I organized the Adams Morgan Organization (AMO) neighborhood government….^[17]

Based on this string of activities ranging almost a decade, in the space of only a page, it’s apparent that Kotler is telescoping together events covering a significant stretch of time. So there’s no reason to believe that the invitation to join as a visiting fellow or the IPS seminars necessarily came at the same time as Hess’s initial contact. And Hess’s movement from right to left, while it may have occurred “in a flash,” was probably not instantaneous. Nevertheless, we can take this as credible evidence that Hess’s communications with the IPS began in 1965.

According to a December 1969 article in The Washingtonian, Stephen Hess — an associate fellow at IPS — invited Karl in 1965 to speak as part of “a seminar on the future of the Republican party.”^[18] And Ken Western, a scholar on Hess, recalls that Marc Raskin “invited Karl to talk about Barry Goldwater and the 1964 presidential campaign” in 1967 or 1968.^[19]

Other evidence strongly suggests that until fairly late in the 1960s Hess viewed right-wing anarcho-capitalism as the essentially correct ideology and was interested in the New Left primarily insofar as some aspects of it corresponded with his own right-libertarian positions. And the statement in his autobiography quoted below, that he was “welcomed” at IPS as a “representative of the Old Right,” is further confirmation that even after his active association with him, he continued for some time to view himself as a right-wing ally to the New Left rather than a member.

His active affiliation with IPS as a fellow probably began in 1968. According to Ken Western, the Washington Post published Hess’s review of Richard Barnet’s book Intervention and Revolution in January 7, 1969 issue. He was identified as an IPS fellow in the tagline, suggesting that “he was certainly with IPS at least part of 1968.”^[20]

Still, it appears quite likely that Hess at that time continued to view himself primarily as an anarcho-capitalist who was participating as a fellow-traveler from a different ideological background. His teaching an antiwar seminar at IPS, also in January 1969, was seen by some as “blowing his cover” as a New Leftist or as a “defection” from the right. But syndicated columnist John Chamberlain argued that it was entirely consistent with Hess’s view of himself as an Old Right ally in an antiwar coalition with the New Left.^[21]

This is also borne out by Hess’s own testimony from the time, in a letter to Paul Krassner’s The Realist in May 1967, as well as in his article “The Death of Politics” in the March 1969 issue of Playboy, both of which reflect fairly standard ancap positions. In the former, he wrote:

I occupy a political position which, I am sure, would be anathema to you, i.e., conservative. But I nevertheless find your publication lively, legitimate and interesting. Also I am curious as to why you have never realized that the conservative (particularly the Goldwater-style) position is basically libertarian, anti-establishment and thus closer to yours than, for instance, that of the institutional socialist.^[22]

And in the Playboy article, he seemed to identify himself unequivocally as an anarcho-capitalist: “Laissez-faire capitalism, or anarchocapitalism, is simply the economic form of the libertarian ethic.” His condemnations of corporate capitalism were still of the “not real (i.e. laissez-faire) capitalism” and “that’s cronyism/corporatism, not capitalism” variety, all too familiar for observers of the libertarian movement today: “Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism.”^[23]

Hess’s genuinely left-sounding rhetoric only began to emerge during his stint at Libertarian Forum, reaching their full extent in his 1975 book Dear America.

As already implied, Hess’s period of collaboration with the IPS and the New Left came about through initiatives from the latter side. Mark Raskin and Richard Barnet, founding co-directors of the IPS, approached Hess based on the perceived intersection between the libertarian and decentralist aspects of the New Left with Goldwater’s ideology. They were particularly fascinated by his laissez-faire critique of monopoly capitalism and corporate collusion with the state — features of his politics that had alienated much of the GOP’s old business establishment — and his skepticism toward JFK’s and LBJ’s adventures in Vietnam.^[24] They

understood that there had been an Old Right in this country — a faction that was isolationist in foreign policy and supportive of competition rather than privilege in business. I was welcomed to the Institute… as a representative of that Old Right who could engage in fruitful dialogue with the New Left.^[25]

(Well, to be more exact, the Old Right was for the most part unilateralist in foreign policy and favored America’s traditional Empire in Latin America and the Pacific Rim, and represented the National Association of Manufacturers faction of capital — predominantly medium-sized, labor-intensive enterprises — with their own very real forms of privilege.)

Hess found the New Left attractive from his Old Right standpoint because of its orientation “toward neighborhoods, toward localism, and away from central bureaucracies.” His involvement came during the period in which the New Left was characterized by a “thrust toward decentralism, community, and small-scale organization,” before so many of its leading organizations like SDS were taken over by Maoists.^[26]

His New Left period included several months in 1969 as Washington Editor and contributor at Rothbard’s Libertarian Forum.^[27] This collaboration was during Rothbard’s own period of closest amity with the New Left — a period that ended sooner, with a sharper break, and followed by a much further drift to the right, than was later to be the case with Hess.

II. Shift to the Left

As Jeff Riggenbach put it — in terms that make it clear he regarded the phase as an unfortunate one — Hess’s continuing leftward shift soon went too far for Rothbard. By 1972,

his steady drift leftward had brought him to the parting of the ways with Rothbard.

The Karl Hess of the early 1970s was most often found attired in fatigues, a field jacket, and combat boots. He rode a motorcycle. He gave up his affiliation with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute for an affiliation with the leftwing Institute for Policy Studies. He joined Students for a Democratic Society. He learned welding, worked professionally as a welder, and joined the Wobblies — the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. He hung out with the Black Panthers. He started talking about “community” and about the concerns of “workers” and about the ways in which giant corporations, and the corporate lifestyle and the corporate mindset, menace and victimize ordinary, hardworking Americans.

His 1975 book, Dear America, is full of this sort of vaguely New Leftish stuff, intermixed with passages of pure Rothbardian libertarianism. Hess’s decade or so on the left had a profound influence on the remainder of his life — how he lived, how he thought. But in the end, as it turned out, the left was just one more way station on his road back to the ideological home he had found in the ’60s and then had drifted away from, for what had seemed like good reasons at the time, but had turned out to be illusory, insubstantial.

By the mid ’80s, he was, as Lennon and McCartney might say, back to where he once belonged.^[28]

And reading Hess’s writing even in Libertarian Forum — let alone the anticapitalist rhetoric in his 1975 manifesto Dear America — one can understand how a libertarian of the American pro-capitalist type might be affronted. At the height of his New Left period, he was as hostile to his earlier Old Right affiliations of the 1950s and early 1960s as he later became toward leftism; he went so far as to describe his role in that period as “a paid hand for major capitalist interests.”^[29]

In the first few issues of Libertarian Forum, Hess stuck to safe, tried and true libertarian themes in his “Letter From Washington” column, like domestic police repression and taxes. Rothbard was actually more radical in his positive comments regarding the student revolution and the Black Panthers. In fact Hess’s first mention of the campus radicals and Panthers, in the June 1, 1969 issue, was almost entirely a denunciation of the domestic police apparatus for going after them rather than a commentary on any aspect of their actual politics.^[30]

His first real venture into radical commentary appeared in the next issue, alongside Rothbard’s more radical article “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle.” In “Where Are The Specifics?” Hess, albeit in more moderate terms than Rothbard’s in the same issue, addressed — among other things — justice in property acquisition and the issue of reparations.

Because so many of its people… have come from the right there remains about it at least an aura or, perhaps, miasma of defensiveness, as though its interests really center in, for instance, defending private property. The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.

Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations….

This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom. This is proto-heroic nonsense.

Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncrasies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status….

Libertarians could and should propose specific revolutionary tactics and goals which would have specific meaning to poor people and to all people; to analyze in depth and to demonstrate in example the meaning of liberty, revolutionary liberty to them….

The proposals should take into account the revolutionary treatment of stolen ‘private’ and ‘public’ property in libertarian, radical, and revolutionary terms; the factors which have oppressed people so far, and so forth….

– Land ownership and/or usage in a situation of declining state power. The Tijerina situation suggests one approach. There must be many others. And what about (realistically, not romantically) water and air pollution liability and prevention?

– Worker, share-owner, community roles or rights in productive facilities in terms of libertarian analysis and as specific proposals in a radical and revolutionary context. What, for instance, might or should happen to General Motors in a liberated society? Of particular interest, to me at any rate, is focusing libertarian analysis and ingenuity on finishing the great unfinished business of the abolition of slavery. Simply setting slaves free, in a world still owned by their masters, obviously was an historic inequity….  Thoughts of reparations today are clouded by concern that it would be taken out against innocent persons who in no way could be connected to former oppression. There is an area where that could be avoided: in the use of government-‘owned’ lands and facilities as items of exchange in compensating the descendants of slaves and making it possible for them to participate in the communities of the land, finally, as equals and not wards.^[31]

He further developed this commentary on the right’s reflexive defense of “property” in the November 1 issue, observing that conservatives excoriate the Robin Hood legend mainly because, from their perspective, “the mere fact of having riches is the only standard against which to judge the theft of those riches.”

In short, the conservative notion is that to steal anything from anybody is a crime — regardless of the source of the thing being ripped off or the nature of the owner’s position in regard to the society in general….

…It is possible that the specter of Robin Hood today haunts so many conservative dreams not because of their pure thoughts on property rights so much as because of the possibly impure origins of the property dearest to their own hearts.^[32]

As he continued to find his voice, Hess referred scathingly to the bulk of right-wing support for libertarianism as “almost exclusively toward the institutionalization of a currently vested interest (i.e. anti-Communism, corporate protectionism, class or race privilege, religion) rather than in the development of a new movement.”^[33]

And in the September 1 issue, he called into question the right-libertarian core distinction between gummint and bidness, at least in the case of the corporate economy:

Corporations in no way present a countervailing force to the state. They are, in effect, licensed by the state, they are treated in special ways (i.e. as though no one in them had any individual responsibility) by the state, taxed in special ways by the state, and so forth. They are either simply economic arms of the state or, to put it in another way, the state is simply the police arm of the corporations. Under the American system of state capitalism, as under the similar system in the Soviet Union, that’s just the way it is.^[34]

By the late fall of 1969, there were signs of a growing split between Rothbard and Hess. Rothbard’s leading article “Ultra-Leftism” in the November 15 issue denounced the SDS for its “Marxian New Left” emphasis on the working class and “student lumpen” as agents of revolution rather than on the broad, taxpaying middle class, and for having, “in the past year, …become largely Stalinoid” — and as a result “rapidly disintegrating.” He argued for a “division of labor” in which libertarians would leave the campus radicals to SDS and themselves concentrate on the middle class; and, accordingly, eschew the hippie aesthetic in order to avoid offending the Silent Majority’s cultural values.^[35]

A month later Hess, while making clear his disagreement with Rothbard, denied any personal rift between them and did his best to downplay the significance of the issue  (albeit with somewhat of a passive-aggressive “who died and made you boss?” subtext).

In the existential struggle between liberty and authority there also are many rooms, indeed, a thousand flowers bloom on either side of the dividing line.

My own summary of the matter is known as The Oink Principle. It states that if it oinks it is your enemy. If it does not oink it may not be your best friend but it is, at least, not your enemy.

I have consulted lately with my very dear friend, Murray Rothbard, on this matter and he tells me that although he will continue to criticize my, and others’, left wlng adventurism, that he has not detected a single oink from my room. I have not, in turn, heard any such sound from his.

There are others, however, who may take Murray’s criticisms as some sort of anathema being pronounced upon them. They may mistake simple criticism for lethal exclusionism. This strikes me as a needless reaction. There are many anarchists who hold, for instance, that not even God is god. Why should they make the mistake of thinking that Rothbard is? He is a comrade, not a deity; a brilliant economist, not a burning bush; a revolutionary theorist, not an executioner.

It is clear by my actions, I am sure, that I do not agree with a substantial portion of Murray’s recent criticism. I even disagree with the emphasis upon criticism itself which seems to have overtaken him. I would prefer, and hopefully expect, that his talents would be turned more to analysis of the political situation generally rather than to the personalities of our part of it in particular. Having even said that, however, I must admit that his latest criticisms of left wing adventurism, which did contain pointed comments about many of us, also contained a thoughtful commentary upon the possibilities of politicizing liberals. I am, as a matter of fact, in close and regular contact with several of the other adventurists criticized in Murray’s commentary. Neither they nor l feel personally offended at all by what he had to say.

We simply disagree.

We say, in effect, “Well, that’s Murray.” We expect that, when all is said and done, Murray, similarly, will sigh and say, Well, that’s them.”…

…It is to say that when Rothbard rumbles all need not quake and similarly it is to say that Rothbard, rumbling, should realize that for many who feel him as their mentor it is difficult to resist an over-reaction.^[36]

This response by Hess was followed, in rapid fire succession, by Rothbard’s denunciation of the economic errors of anarcho-communism (quoting Ortega y Gasset, no less) in the January 1, 1970 issue,^[37] “The New Left, RIP” in March,^[38] a commentary on the “Looney Left” in April,^[39] and a “Farewell to the Left” in May.^[40] Hess continued to be listed on the masthead as “Washington Editor” through the April 15 issue; but the eirenic gestures in his column of the previous November notwithstanding, it was the last column of his published in Libertarian Forum. As it turned out, Rothbard apparently did feel that all need quake when he rumbled.

Hess’s period of active experimentation with leftist ideas, just getting underway in his bare eight months at Libertarian Forum, had reached full maturity by 1975 with the publication of Dear America. At the outset, he condemned the anti-libertarian nature of both corporate capitalism and state socialism in virtually identical terms.

What I have learned about corporate capitalism, roughly, is that it is an act of theft, by and large, through which a very few live very high off the work, invention, and creativity of very many others. It is the Grand Larceny of our particular time in history, the Grand Larceny in which a future of freedom which could have followed the collapse of feudalism was stolen from under our noses by a new bunch of bosses doing the same old things.

What I have learned about state socialism, roughly, is that it is an act of betrayal through which aspirations for a humane and cooperative way of living together and in peace are sacrificed to or stolen by bureaucrats who have contrived a new synthesis of capitalism’s obsessive bookkeeping with feudalism’s top-down, absolute authority. It seems the worst of all possible worlds, a mirror image of corporate capitalism, reflecting the same ultimate purpose: to produce a social order in which docile, carefully taught people follow, without whimper or shout, the commands of a ruling class.^[41]

…[S]o long as a class of owners controls industry, whether that class is the moneyed plutocracy of America or the political oligarchy in the Soviet Union, then the people generally will be extensions of the machines, extensions of the ledger, and not truly human at all in the eyes of the owners.^[42]

His critique focused on the centralization, hierarchy, artificial complexity, and all-around undemocratic nature of their organizational styles.

We hear that the reason we cannot control our own lives is that “‘society’”’ is just too big and too complex for that. It must be “run.” We can’t do it….

Common sense could view it this way: If, indeed, society is too big and too complex for people generally to control it…, then maybe it is too big and too complex.

The commonsense alternative would be: Make it smaller. Make it less complex. Return to people, in the process, the practical possibility of controlling their own lives….^[43]

The corporate managerial class, as much as the political class, was largely parasitic and unproductive, engaged in what David Graeber would later call “bullshit jobs.”

The bosses are far from being all political. Men who work in factories know that there are bosses, administrative bosses, who do nothing in a specifically productive sense. They do not enhance the product. They do not make it or design it, or even sell it. They have two functions: to maximize profits — by any means possible — and to manipulate people, as one way of doing that other, primary job, but also as a way, simply, to justify their own existence.

Recent and ongoing industrial experience has shown, however, that bosses are not only nonproductive but actually may be counterproductive. Certain factories have turned the job of scheduling shifts and performance over to the logical persons, the ones involved. The result has been better work all around. Leaders, bosses, simply are not needed to tell people how to do things that they, the people, are obviously competent to do because they are the ones who must perform in those things.^[44]

Hess compared the attitudes of both conservatives and liberals in America on the subjects of work and welfare, and found them similarly focused on control and disempowerment.

Conservatives often say that they want welfare recipients to work. But what they want is merely menial service, people willing to be the servants of the well-to-do. They do not want work to mean the sort of independence that will be discussed throughout this book: the work of self-managing people. Liberals, on the other hand, don’t want welfare recipients to work. They want them to be clients of their liberal programs, programs which depend upon retaining a constituency of dependent poor rather than upon encouraging independent and therefore quite probably anti-liberal, self-managing workers.^[45]

In place of managerial authoritarianism, he called for a “new age of fully participatory social organization, of control of production by those who produce, of mutual aid…, of privilege ended and responsibility begun…, of self-management.”^[46]

In his critique of managerialism, Hess anticipated Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” — the process by which venture capitalists, private equity and the financial sector hollow out actual productive capability, degrade quality, and either hinder technological development or divert it into trivial or purely cosmetic channels. “With fewer people actually competent to design, repair and build tools, every managerial mistake has more lasting effects, waste becomes less tolerable, and real innovations less likely.”^[47] I write this, incidentally, less than a week after the implosion of the OceanGate Titan craft and loss of its crew, owing to design decisions by cowboy capitalist adherents of the “move fast and break things” philosophy.

At the same time, as points of failure proliferate within the system, its mechanisms for coping with failure become more and more brittle.

The vitality to sustain a truly productive and innovative system is draining away. And it is draining away at the most crucial time. It is draining away when all of the easy supports for production such as cheap fuel, unlimited access to raw materials and a totally dedicated work force are also draining away….

…As the problems multiply, the institutions to deal with them shrink in number but spread vastly in scope, so that fewer rather than more people are “officially” involved in the solutions. Common sense, on the other hand, would surely suggest that with more problems you might need more and not fewer solvers, more and not less skill, and more not fewer willing hands.^[48]

Hess also echoed a principle, variously known as the second watershed or counterproductivity, formulated by Ivan Illich.^[49]

The cities are falling apart. Nothing works in them. Crime goes up and so does the police budget. The police can’t protect. Transportation declines and the highway budget goes up. The roads can’t deliver, they can only congest. Kids seem to get dumber but the school budgets stay high. Schools can’t educate — at best they candidly try to pacify.^[50]

Hess took another position anathema to mainstream right-libertarianism, in acknowledging the existence not only of political power but of “concentrated economic power — power that is concentrated in close collusion with state power at every step of the way.” The failure to confront economic power was “a contradiction that absolutely haunts the entire conservative position”^[51] — and by implication also the libertarian right.

In the political theory of the life I had led, the abilities of people to control their own lives were seen as sharply divided. On the one hand people were said to have enough sense to run their lives without the interference of a lot of government bureaucrats. But on the other hand they were not seen as able to govern their lives without a lot of corporate bosses.^[52]

For Hess, the absorption of small businesses by national oligopoly corporations and franchise chains was just another form of nationalization, in which the bureaucrats were corporate instead of state.^[53]

It’s important to note that, in his migration to the left, Hess went straight to the actual left, which he distinguished from the kind of “squishy liberalism” that “always supports corporate power with government regulation and establishes new programmatic ways to regiment the population, and particularly the poor, into totally dependent federal constituencies.”^[54] As he proudly stated after his return to the right, “I have participated in most of the major cultural and political-social movements of our time, excepting only one.  I am not now, nor have I ever been, a liberal.”^[55]

He saw New Deal liberalism, far from being in the adversarial relation to big business portrayed by Democratic political rhetoric, as motivated by the perceived need on the part of policy intellectuals “to save the great industrial, banking, and owning system that was threatened by the rising discontent of people generally and by, particularly, the very good chance that working people would organize to demand control of industry and not merely better wages.”^[56] Rank-and-file middle class liberals

(in the sense of those who, like the nice ladies and proper gents of the reform movements in the big cities, wanted to do good for the common folk without letting the common folk do good for themselves) loved the idea of a government that would poke a few rich snoots and let a lot of sociologists and college professors assume titles of governmental grandeur —and spend the poor folks’ money for the poor folks’ own good.^[57]

The central focus of the New Deal, as he summarized it, was essentially a restatement of the Corporate Liberal thesis:

to provide machinery through which government could mediate the potentially dangerous competition between industrialists and financiers which many saw as a cause, for instance, of the Great Depression. Rather than competition among the very rich, cooperation could be achieved, through various government agencies which could regulate production, oversee pricing policies, prevent unduly harsh raids of one business against another, even prevent titanic battles to form new monopolies (which might threaten the old ones!). Also, the New Deal went along with the trade union movement, but in such a way as to encourage the least dangerous part of it — the part concerned solely with wages and contracts — and discourage the most dangerous part — the part concerned with decisions, ownership, work conditions, nature of products, and the whole idea (of working for wages rather than, for instance, sharing in the entire enterprise).^[58]

The practical effect of the liberal agenda, as opposed to the left, was — across the board — the substitution of “concentrated managerial power” for democratic control.

By applying at every accessible level of government the liberal idea of concentrated managerial power (the “good” people making decisions for the people generally), the cities have become collapsing and unmanageable jungles, neighborhoods have been abandoned and disbanded, locality has been blighted, localism has been scoffed into obsolescence….^[59]

What attracted him to the New Left, on the other hand, was its focus on decentralism, direct democracy, and direct control by people over their own lives at the community level. The irony was that, despite so much of the New Left’s agenda mirroring the claimed principles of the right, the latter became unhinged with rage in reaction to it.

There was the old right, preaching mightily about the encroachment of the federal establishment into every area of local life. And there was SDS, in its very earliest organizing projects, working for, of all things, neighborhood self-reliance and independence. There were, along the way, some perceptive SDS theorists, such as Carl Oglesby (later to become a warm and admired friend) writing that there is a “moral confluence” between the old right and the new left.

And there were the Panthers.

The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, as it was in its beginning days in Oakland, was a nightmare to the right wing. The famed picture of armed black men standing proudly/arrogantly (take your choice according to bias) in the California State House sent shivers down our spines. But they were such wrong shivers. They were shivers of fear. They should have been shivers of pride and admiration. What right winger worthy of his extremist position and his place on the liberal blacklist had not dreamed at one time or another of that final, can’t-stand-it-any-longer day when aroused Americans, like their revolutionary forefathers, would take up their muskets again and say NO to the bureaucrats?…

And, so, here were black men acting out the fantasy, actually telling a gang of bureaucrats that they would not be disarmed (a constant right-wing pride), that they would not be shoved around by the police (the right wing, of course, would never say police, because of shallow analysis, but would, instead, say politicians or bureaucrats, forgetting who backs up the politicians and the bureaucrats). In short, here were black men saying, in actual fact, that they did not consider extremism in the defense of their freedom to be a vice or moderation in the pursuit of justice to be a virtue.

Even more, the Black Panthers were neighborhood-oriented! They did not even at the outset preach a doctrine of global communism or world government or even set as a goal the assumption of national power. They wanted, instead, freedom where they lived, freedom to have communities rather than colonies.

The right should have cheered. Instead, it called the cops.^[60]

Hess’s position, in regard to conservatism, capitalism, state socialism, and managerialist liberalism alike, was that power is bad.

If every lesson I have learned in a long political life had to be distilled into a single one, it would be that when the people generally permit positions of power to exist, the people generally and in the long run suffer and become subjects. In a world of power there always are two classes: the powerful and the powerless, the owners and the dispossessed. And between these two classes there must always be a conflict of interest…. A free society is where all have power—power over and responsibility for their own lives, power and reason to respect the lives of others.^[61]

If what he hated was managerialism and concentrated power, what he ardently desired, conversely, was for ordinary people to have full control over every aspect of their lives.

In essence, I think, the struggle will be over whether to continue to separate or to bring together the political and economic parts of our lives. The political part of our lives already has one well-defined theme: that political democracy is desirable….

There is no wider discrepancy in American life than between the familiar and accepted rhetoric of political democracy and the rejection as overly radical of the ideas of industrial democracy. Yet, I have come to feel, there can be no actual democracy of any sort so long as the work people do and the lives people lead are separated by law and custom into airtight compartments.

Industrial democracy simply says that people who work should participate in the decisions of work just as they should participate in the decisions of community. It says that doing work entitles a person to this participation, just as being in a community entitles a person to participation there.^[62]

As a result of Hess’s negative experiences with AMO and Community Technology — their failure from lack of local public support — he began a gradual slide to the right. But even as late as 1979, he was still writing economic commentary that would turn a right-libertarian’s hair white: “Cost is a bookkeeping matter, it is the result of social agreements and is not a part of the natural or material world. Costs are what a particular value system says they are.”^[63]

III. Alternative Technology and Localism

According to Hess, it was as a result of his increasing affinity for tinkering in the immediate post-Goldwater period that he eventually “became, by default, the resident expert in appropriate, community-based technology at the Institute for Policy Studies.”^[64]

His interest in local self-rule and community economies was also intensified by his association at IPS with Milton Kotler, the author of Neighborhood Government.^[65]

His thinking at this time reflected the same broad currents of technological and industrial thinking that produced the Whole Earth Catalog, Colin Ward’s neighborhood workshops and reworking of Kropotkin, and the Radical Technology group; it also reflected the municipalism of Murray Bookchin and others.

I recall standing in front of a church in Washington and hearing a Panther speak of why he did not want the Panthers to be involved in an “international movement.” International, he said, meant something between nations. He was not interested in nations, he said. He wanted a world where relations were between communities. Intercommunalism was the phrase he used.

It was a haunting echo. Gandhi had spoken of a world of villages, relating one to another without the artificial restrictions of political systems and borders. Goldwater, even though an ardent nationalist, had made speech after speech suggesting the dream of people living in communities of self-reliance and self-responsibility. The antifederalists of the American Revolution, preferring the Articles of Confederation to the nation-binding Constitution, also had obviously dreamed of a land which might never be a great and powerful nation but which could be a sweet and free country of towns and villages and farms.^[66]

And it reflected as well the general currents of populism, decentralism, and direct democracy embodied in such cultural artifacts as The People’s Bicentennial Commission manifesto Common Sense II and Harry Boyte’s The Backyard Revolution, during the fluid period of experimentation in the mid- to late 1970s, when such ideas seemed to offer a viable alternative to the collapsing New Deal Consensus, and before the New Right achieved hegemony.

As he became increasingly disillusioned with New Left organizational politics and the authoritarian hijacking of its institutions — albeit not with leftist analysis — Hess intensified his focus on alternative technology as a way of substituting direct action for politics. Despite his alienation from the institutional politics of the New Left, he celebrated the continuation of its principles in the communitarian and decentralized technology movements.

New Left firebrands who once thought they could organize people just on the basis of a bullhorn and book-learned slogans have reemerged as artisans and craftspeople, doctors, lawyers, nurses, biologists, physicists, you name it—still working in local political settings but now more a part of the general working population, possessing new hard skills to go along with their rhetoric, and infinitely more respected as a result. Counter-culture survivors have undergone a similar growth. Food faddism, for some, has been modified into skillful farming. Hallucinations have dimmed and arts have grown. Crafts abound, and not just artsy-craftsy ones but earthier skills such as plumbing, carpentry and masonry. Graduates of the counter culture now operate thriving repair shops, garages, stores, and even community financial development funds, all sustained by the work of participants who enjoy full equality of voice and responsibility.^[67]

In describing the liberatory potential of new, decentralized technology, Hess stressed the contrast between the “new knowledge” and the old institutions.

The new knowledge, produced by millions of hardworking people, tells us that healthful food can be grown in small scale operations in and near cities, avoiding transportation and packaging costs. The old institutions tell us that farming is a corporate prerogative and that the goal of farming is not nutrition at all, but is first and foremost profits. The new knowledge tells us that disposable containers and tacky goods are technologically absurd and that more permanent, not wasteful things could be built and could even be built in organizations of rather small scale.^[68]

…We are involved in what John Blair has called ‘’The New Industrial Revolution,” the revolution of new techniques, new tools, and new materials which allow for decentralized technology that is relatively simple to use and inexpensive to operate. As Dr. Blair states: “These new materials are neither labor intensive, nor capital intensive. They are knowledge intensive.”^[69]

The general principles of a decentralized and human alternative technology, he stated as:

(1) It would not increase the incidence of death, disease, or nervousness.

(2) It would conform to, rather than attempt to defy, the widest possible array of physical principles, and would not be evaluated just in terms of its own operation. It would, in other words, exist in nature and not in isolation from it.

(3) Its application would be organized by those who would operate the tool or process in consultative conjunction with anyone affected by the tool or process. They would be accountable for their work because they could be absolutely identified with it. There would be no right of ownership which would prevent the use of the tool or process by anyone else capable of operating it and willing to be accountable for it.

(4) It would mainly use resources that could be renewed, replaced, or recycled. If such virtually irreplaceable resources as fossil hydrocarbons (petroleum, coal) were used, they should be used in ways with the least possible impact on the environment.

(5) It would be appropriate for widespread community participation and understanding. It could be operated nonhierarchically, would encourage productive involvement and discourage consideration of itself solely in terms of consumption.

(6) Its availability to small human communities would be an important measure of its effectiveness. This contrasts with the current technological standard of effective support of large institutions.

(7) It would foster a culture in which the applications of scientific principles would always be guided by such tests as these:

Is the application such that if everyone in the world were individually availed of its use, or involved in its operation, no human life would be threatened by it, no community destroyed by it, no future threatened by it?

Or,

The application of any scientific principle should do unto others as we would wish to have done to ourselves by others applying the same principle.

A strong reinforcement of an alternative technology’s limiting principle would be the absence of restrictions on information regarding any scientific principle and the rejection of any restrictive rights of ownership in regard to the application of any scientific principle.^[70]

He also speculated that the human-scale technological ecosystem of the future would embody a principle essentially the same as what Lewis Mumford called “polytechnic,” or the coexistence of what are conventionally labeled “high-technology” and “low-technology,” adapted respectively to their most appropriate uses.

In such a life-style, technologies would be applied not simply because they were known but only because they were prudently needed. It would be a world of diversity, not frantic conformity. Physicists undoubtedly would pursue the deeper meanings of material particles, but perhaps with accelerators made by themselves, rather than in remote factories by government grant. Medical researchers undoubtedly would chase the virus into its molecular lair, but health care might be more a matter of everyday community activity than an exotic performance in a marble hall. Gravity might be conquered for some purposes, and yet the horse might serve perfectly well to carry a person for other purposes.^[71]

With his wife Therese, and in collaboration with Communitas College and the IPS, he formed the Community Technology nonprofit in 1973, based in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., under the umbrella of the Adams-Morgan Organization.^[72] His thinking on alternative technology and community economics in this period is reflected in Dear America (written in 1975, when he was still actively involved in the Community Technology project), his book Neighborhood Power, coauthored with David Morris in the same year, and his retrospective account Community Technology, written in 1979.

Its purpose was simply to demystify technology so that instead of seeming a mysterious force it could become a part of everyday life, a catalyst to community self-reliance, a way to give people greater control over their individual destinies, and a servant in direct service to human needs in a local setting.

That local setting was the Adams-Morgan neighborhood. It spanned some seventy blocks in the center of Washington, D.C., and, at the time, had a population that was 58 percent black, 22 percent Latin American, 18 percent white, and the remainder mostly Middle Eastern. It was a neighborhood in transition, economically quite poor but culturally diverse and exciting. It was, we believed, the perfect place to try an experiment in participatory community that would make technology accessible and understandable to those who choose to use it. There was, we believed, a need for Community Technology. While neighbors, citizens, and community leaders worried about every other aspect of the neighborhood, there seemed to be no one very concerned about its material base — how it could produce things.

Our answer was inexpensive, available, and decentralized technology — giving local residents the tools, and the scientific understanding, to produce what they needed and where they needed it most:  at home and in community.^[73]

Hess began the book Community Technology by contrasting the giant, centralized institutions that were failing to adequately perform their functions, that were “creaking, crackling, and even crashing under their own weight” to an alternative way of doing things:

I am convinced now that there are other possibilities.  I have worked enough at the practical development and deployment of them to see them as wholly available as alternatives here and now.

It is possible for us – working together in social situations of various sizes according to our preferences – to spend our time almost exactly as we want to. The rules and imperatives that conventional wisdom fasten on us are not binding except to the extent we let them be.

Technologies, ways of working, kinds of tools, can be developed, deployed, and maintained at the community level.

Communities, founded upon ways of life that reflect the values and aspirations of the people who compose the community, can take long steps toward exactly the degree of self-reliance that will best serve the purposes of the community. Communities can, without complex social controls, cooperate with other communities to provide things not locally available, to enlarge cultures, to do anything that will enhance the community without destroying it.

There are no shortages of anything on the face of the earth that would prevent any community from surviving healthily and happily…. This book is an argument for community participation, with all of the diversity and resultant flexibilities that that implies.^[74]

He compared the attitudes fostered by centralized technology and production with those representative spectator “democracy” encouraged in the citizenry.

The kind of technology that is possible, and which would suit the old yearnings of the American Dream, is exactly the kind that would undermine the sort of spectator-sport politics we have come to play. It would be a technology in which ordinary people participated very actively. It would be a tool to serve their purposes and make possible the kinds of lives they (and not Madison Avenue fantasists) want to live. Having a role in the development, deployment, and maintenance of technology. Wouldn’t people also want more of a role in politics? Wouldn’t they want a politics that makes possible a democratic life rather than a politics that makes necessary a life subordinated not to politics but to politicians?

In politics a person is not a citizen if the person’s only function is to vote. Voters choose people who, in turn, act like citizens. They argue. They establish the forms within which people live their lives. They make politics. The people who merely vote for them merely make politicians. People who argue for their positions in a town meeting are acting like citizens. People who simply drop scraps of paper in a box or pull a lever are not acting like citizens; they are acting like consumers, picking between prepackaged political items. They had nothing to do with the items. All they can do is pick what is. They cannot actively participate in making what should be.

In technology there is the same thing. To be merely a consumer of technology is always to accept and take what is and never to shape what could be.^[75]

Besides technology narrowly defined, clearly, Hess was deeply committed to broader issues of community economic independence, self-reliance, and resilience. But for communities of people to run their own affairs, they must have a material base. A self-governing community whose material needs are controlled from outside is a contradiction in terms.

If local liberty has no material base, then it ultimately has no base at all. National political liberty – the freedom of national political leaders to act – has such a material base. For the generals it is the material base of nationally sponsored weapons production, which, in material fact, gives them the physical power to protect and extend political decisions. For the multinational corporations it involves continued access to raw materials upon which production may be based and flexibly moved hither and yon.

Unless localities could have an equivalent base in the material world, a base that can literally support the freedom of local people to make political decisions which affect their lives, then local liberty must remain a mere administrative proposal, gauged roughly by the amount of elbow room the local people are given by those who do have a base in the material world from which to exercise power.^[76]

The purpose of Community Technology was to organize such a material base. In response to skeptics who dismissed relocalized production based on “economies of scale” and the like, Hess gave a general overview of the possibilities.

A city neighborhood, seen as a concrete-bound ghetto, scarcely seems worth considering agriculturally. True enough. Agriculture and city spaces are apparently incompatible. Gardening and city spaces are not. Can gardening produce ample food for a neighborhood?

Hydroponic gardens in small greenhouse enclosures produce vegetables at a rate many times greater than ordinary agriculture. In one notable example, ten acres of greenhouses produced two million pounds of vegetables annually at a cost of twenty cents per pound, including the amortization of the structures, the desalting of water (it’s a seaside operation at Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf), administration, etc…. City rooftop spaces, plus vacant lots or even the centers of streets, could be used to grow ample vegetables for a local population…. This is not to say that any neighborhood would not want to supplement local vegetables with those grown by other, distant communities. They surely might. And that in turn just means that neighborhoods also have an inherent capacity to engage in “foreign trade.” Herd animals such as beef cattle are clearly inappropriate to city neighborhoods. Chickens and fish are just as clearly appropriate. Aquaculture – growing fish in artificial settings – can produce high yields of high-quality protein in basement spaces….

Problems of waste disposal also have undoubtedly contributed to the assumption that there is no material possibility for local liberty. A city waste sewerage system, indeed, would seem to defy any ability of a single neighborhood. At the very least it can be assumed – and, I feel, justifiably – that a neighborhood would have to join with all contiguous neighborhoods to duplicate or even maintain the usual city sewerage system….

City waste sewerage systems are wasteful, unnecessary, often dangerous, and certainly technologically backward. Neighborhoods are hooked into them because of history, not because of any current necessity. First of all, waste is not a problem, it is a resource. City waste systems simply ignore this…. In-house waste-digestion systems, now commercially available at costs as low as a thousand dollars, will convert all human and kitchen wastes into an odorless fertilizer. Some provide modest amounts of heating gas as they do it. (The average family could do all its cooking on the gas produced by its own waste.)….

Manufacturing today is thought of as a massive large-scale system by advocates of massive large-scale ownership.

It is assumed that it is appropriate to our needs mainly because of assumptions about those needs: quickly obsolescent products, package-emphasizing products, and proliferating fad products.

In point of material fact, manufacturing has undergone the sort of technological change that has characterized all science-based activities in this century – a distinct tendency toward decentralization and small-scale units. A truly modern cybernated plant, turning out a vast array of machine parts, for instance, can be housed easily in a city neighborhood, in conventional office space. It uses computers to direct its tools, and can be handily operated by workers trained in the neighborhood….^[77]

Hess wrote at a time when miniaturization of computerized numeric control (CNC) machine tools was just starting to make local networked production possible in places like Emilia-Romagna. Subsequent progress in cheapening and miniaturization of CNC machinery over the following decades, and the resulting growth of the micromanufacturing movement and tabletop machinery scaled to the small workshop like the Global Village Construction Set being developed by the Open Source Ecology/Factor e Farm project today,^[78] have only strengthened his argument.

The great factories which seem so complicated and which, the managers say, require the special gifts of the great owners to organize, are also problems of organization and not necessities of technology. The thrust of all modern technology is toward miniaturization and cybernetic controls that make sophisticated production possible on a very small scale. Even the machinery of the steel industry is constantly reduced in scale as it increases in effectiveness. It is the demands of corporate power, and not of technology, that keep steel production as a concentrated blight in a few environments rather than letting it be more localized and lesser in environmental impact. (The most innovative plastics, as a matter of fact, are so obviously best used in small scale production settings that some giant corporations who have gone into plastics have got right out again because they simply couldn’t compete with smaller, more technically innovative and flexible plants.)^[79]

All forms of factory production which seem to call for giant, centralized facilities, can alternatively be imagined as small, localized operations using, for instance, direct numerical control (cybernated) machinery.^[80]

As for the raw materials required for production, it’s true as far as it goes that they “are not usually appropriate to neighborhood production….” But they can be obtained by trade or federative relationships with the “neighborhoods” — arguably an anticipation of Elinor Ostrom’s natural resource commons — that produce the resources.

If the raw materials are forever consigned to central buyers or to central governments, then their use as neighborhood resources will remain also at a far remove. There is no technically compelling reason, however, that the neighborhoods that produce raw materials could not trade those raw materials more directly with neighborhood refining facilities or with facilities maintained by groups of neighborhoods.

Energy production is strikingly adaptable to neighborhood scale. Solar energy, economically collectable as heat, could provide at least half of the cooling and heating requirements of any inner-city neighborhood. Photovoltaic cells that directly convert solar to electrical energy are on the verge of manufacturing breakthroughs that could make them the cheapest, most decentralizing power source yet.^[81]

Again, Hess’s most euphoric predictions in the 1970s seem dated now. Photovoltaic power has cheapened to the point that it recently became less expensive than coal, and its generation capacity is doubling every year or two.

Transportation within neighborhoods generally is seen as merely an extension of the transportation demands not of citizens but of corporations. Yet the two demands are different. Corporate transportation need not occupy the total travel space of a neighborhood. Most citizen travel is of short duration and is ideally suited to electric vehicles. These vehicles in turn are simply built and also quite adaptable to the most localized production facilities. General Motors boasts that its Basic Transportation Vehicle can be built in a space the size of a barn and for a total capital investment of $50,000. Run by an electric rather than internal combustion engine, the BTV, or something like it, could serve most of the transportation needs of any American neighborhood. It could also be built there….

Health care, on the other hand, seems far more complicated, and the current tendency to destroy small facilities in favor of huge teaching-hospital empires might appear an argument against any consideration of locally based health care. At the same time, however, the common-sense emphasis on paramedical personnel to handle perhaps a majority of everyday health problems and the equally common-sense emphasis on citizen health awareness show a movement as strikingly toward localization as the more publicized movement toward megamedical centers. Although it is true that exotic ailments might not be treated in good style in a local medical facility, it is also true that most people do not require such service and that to distort an entire technology for the least rather than for the greatest needs seems a questionable practice.

Simply reinstituting the practice of house calls by physicians would, probably, eliminate the need for a majority of today’s centralized medical facilities.^[82]

In the field of healthcare, large-scale hospitals “could be imagined alternatively as smaller, more localized facilities for most patient care problems…, with perhaps regional facilities for more complex treatments requiring machines costly to duplicate. But of course, jurisdictional jealousies would have to be replaced by broad cooperation.”^[83]

Nowhere has the potential for small-scale organization left Hess’s predictions so far behind as in the case of communications.

Communications and information systems are already involved in technologies which are adaptable without any question to the most localized uses. Virtually every neighborhood in America has within it amateur communications technicians of reasonably high skill: ham radio operators. Citizen-band radios further democratize the use of radio communications. Further, the very scale of the neighborhood makes it adaptable to communications of the most traditional kind – bulletin boards, wall posters, signs, even town criers or sound trucks. Newspapers on a community scale can be produced in small spaces and with wise recycling of materials or even substitutions of materials (for instance, material that can be quickly erased and re-used) or they can be in electronic forms. Even the raw materials for print media could be held fairly close to the possibilities of neighborhood self-sufficiency and responsibility. The point is not that a neighborhood would thus close itself off from all other communications. The point is simply that the neighborhood can have internal communications sufficient to a fully developed politics of internal freedom and could thereafter enjoy any extended communications with a world of other communities that might be desired.

Computers, of course, have made the storage and retrieval of information a matter of the most drastically reduced scale. They are adaptable also to local manufacture. They are perfectly suited to neighborhood use. Used in neighborhoods, with local familiarity and control, the computer might be seen as more of a tool than a weapon.

Even the problem of traditional information, exemplified in the library, is solvable in a way most compatible with neighborhood scale. Microfiche readers of great sophistication, but happily of reasonably straightforward and small-scale manufacturing technique, mean that the entire contents of the Library of Congress can be stored in a small office space, taking up no more room than the pet food section of a supermarket.^[84]

Since then Moore’s Law and the fiber optic network, of course, have left most of these proposals far behind. That’s especially true of microfiche. Twenty years ago, in The Star Fraction, Ken MacLeod was already writing about CD-Roms containing the entire Library of Congress in the near future. Today I estimate I can find over 95% of the scholarly books and journal articles I need online via Library Genesis and Science Hub, and most popular fiction in print through either Library Genesis or Anna’s Archive. The same is true of communications. Community bulletin boards were already a thing in the 1990s. And while ham radio and CB may be of great use in catastrophic emergencies when fiber optic networks are shut down, the rest of the time networked communication via the Internet has made them largely obsolete.

A great deal of relocalization is not only feasible; given the colonial nature of the neighborhood economy in relation to outside capital, the extractive nature of the latter, and the internal domination of the neighborhood by what amounts to a comprador bourgeoisie, it is necessary.

Our neighborhoods are tiny, underdeveloped nations. They are owned, by and large, by outsiders who view them as profitable investments. Local money is put into financial institutions which invest it outside the local economy, often in competing industries….

The neighborhood, or little country if we follow that analogy, exports labor-intensive services and imports capital-intensive finished goods, paying out high prices for a technology generally unsuited to local conditions. There is little domestic industry and, where it does exist, it is supplied by foreign firms. The neighborhood is a net importer of goods and services, is always in debt, and, if it is a recognized political unit, keeps its head above water by taxing domestic businesses and residents’ income, usually through regressive taxes, in order to maintain an inadequate welfare system.

Many neighborhoods are divided. Some people are rich and are allied with the foreign interests, often as minor partners. The middle class work as managers in the foreigners’ firms, and try desperately to conform to the values of the upper class.^[85]

The neighborhood has immense flows of capital and tax revenue — most of it flowing outward. As Milton Kotler put it:

The important features of a poor neighborhood are, first, the discrepancy between the aggregate expendable income of the neighborhood and the paltry level of its commerce, and, second, the discrepancy between the considerable tax revenue the neighborhood generates and the low level of benefits it receives in public services and welfare. In both cases the neighborhood exports its income …. Its present internal commerce is dependent, as is its level of public services, on commerce and personnel outside the neighborhood.^[86]

As a program for implementing the vision of a relocalized economy, Hess recommended starting from something very much like the “community resource mapping” described by more recent municipalist thinkers like J.K. Gibson-Graham and others.

—A community survey of the patterns of ownership in your town. Who owns the property? Local people? Out-of-towners? Financial institutions? It makes a difference, but few towns have ever bothered to study it closely.

—A tax study. Where does the tax money go? What is the full flow of public money into the community and out of the community? Many a town has been astonished to discover that more goes out than ever comes in, in terms of public money actually locatable in the town.

—A study of the real economy of the town. What jobs are there? What jobs were there? What is produced, by which people, on what machines or from what resources, and, most importantly, for whose profit and security?

—The material base of the community. Where does the food come from? The energy? Building materials, other raw materials? In short, what is the material situation of the town, overall, not just in terms of isolated businesses, interests, or instances?^[87]

A community skill-resource inventory should be useful. It would involve a systematic door-to-door canvassing of the entire community (the way a dedicated church goes about it, for instance) to discover what social and tutorial skills are held by people in the community. At the same time you could raise the question of the extent to which the people are willing to commit those skills to community projects.^[88]

Such community mapping should include the resources of local government and the public schools.

Road repair and building equipment represents a powerhouse of tools. The community technology group anxious to study shared or community heat-storage facilities or to build a demonstration earth-insulated house could find vital tools in the town garage. In urban neighborhoods there are also possibilities with city equipment, using some, for instance, to bulldoze lots for community gardens, or borrowing help from the fire department to mount a rooftop collector….

It is possible that the school systems and libraries will have concentrations of tools to make the community technologist leap with joy. School labs do have equipment that, if the community technology group can share in paying for, might be used on a community basis after school hours. On the other hand, there may be instances where a community technology proposal and its exploration might itself be a superb way of teaching skills to school classes. The public library’s main resource is a trained ability to help in working out information retrieval systems and perhaps even providing space for information storage.^[89]

Resource mapping also includes the use of bulletin boards, neighborhood newspapers, and electronic means of communication to inform neighborhood residents of the outside interests exercising power over them.

On a different level, residents rarely know who owns their neighborhood. Does one corporation own most of the commercial property? Has land changed hands over the past year or two, indicating that speculators are moving in? What are the current sales prices of houses?

Or, on another level, what are the housing codes? What are the regulations concerning tenant unions? Can someone complain to a landlord about rats in the basement without fearing eviction?…

Finally, what events looming on the horizon can affect the neighborhood? Is someone planning to build a highway through its center? Is a subway stop going to be put in the neighborhood? Is the local school or clinic closing down?^[90]

Once both the available resources and the bottlenecks and dependencies of the local economy were identified, community mapping would be followed by Jane Jacobs’ model of import substitution.

The first step might be the use of neighborhood communications media to bring together people interested in organizing low-overhead services like hot lunches, daycare, bulk food-buying cooperatives, and the like.^[91]

The next step would be more capital-intensive operations, like brick-and-mortar retailers and local industry.

—The threatened closing of a key business or industry is a crucial, even fatal, time for many a town. Does the town have to accept the closing and suffer the consequences or can it act in its own best interest, legally, to do something about it? The subject is wide open for imaginative study. The right of eminent domain, used so often to acquire property for traditional public use, could be explored as a possibility to acquire actual productive facilities whose loss would cripple the town.

—Community ownership of productive facilities can be considered. This process is familiar when it comes to such things as recreation areas, water supply, even some power companies. Could and should the community expand that concept to other areas to sustain its survival?

—Community development of new productive facilities to enhance the self-reliance and the survivability of the town can be considered. Many communities are familiar with the process of a tax-supported industrial site being offered to an outside business to bring them in. Might the town be better served by going one important step beyond the traditional process and studying the possibility of a publicly-owned production facility as well as a publicly-supported site?

—Community federations of self-support and assistance can be formed. This is a possibility that might grow out of the steps already mentioned. If one community chooses to support its own survivability by community-owned and -operated productive facilities, it might be reasonable to assume that others will follow suit — and that trade between those self-supporting community enterprises would be a natural development which could lead to actual regional federations of such community work.^[92]

The development of community productive facilities to facilitate import substitution, he suggested, should include a community machine shop and warehouse.

The machine shop should have enough basic tools, both hand and power, to make the building of demonstration models or test facilities a practical and everyday activity. The shared shop might just be part of some other public facility, used in its off-hours. Or the shop might be separate and stocked with cast-off industrial tools, with tools bought from government surplus through the local school system. Or a community technology group might just go ahead and do it themselves. Work can, of course, be done as well in home shops or in commercial shops of people who like the community technology approach. Results should be fine, but the participants would miss the creative challenge of the shared shop….

Thinking of such a shared workshop in an inner city, you can think of its use also for the maintenance of appliances and other household goods whose replacement might represent a real economic burden in the neighborhood and whose mysteries might be an important part in the feeling of helplessness that many inner-city people develop….

…[T]here might be similar projects that the machine shop could undertake beyond the building of demonstration models and other regular community technology tasks. The machine shop could regularly redesign cast-off items into useful ones. Discarded refrigerators, for instance, suggest an infinity of new uses, from fish tanks, after removing doors, to numerous small parts as each discarded one is stripped for its components, which include small compressors, copper tubing, heat transfer arrays, and so on. The same goes for washing machines. In small towns a nice bonus of recycling such things is that the local landfill or other disposal project doesn’t have the problem of disposing of these relatively large hunks of junk; and that’s all they are unless given a new life by the community technologists!

Similar in spirit to the shared machine shop could be a shared warehouse. Everyone knows the agony of having to throw something away even though instinct says that someday it will be needed. But space does us all in – apartment dwellers immediately, homesteaders finally.

A community decision to share a space in which discarded materials can be stored, categorized, and made easily available is a decision to use an otherwise wasted resource, to be ingenious, and to take back into the hands of the community an active role in making decisions about industrial processes….

The shared warehouse… should collect a trove of bits and pieces of building materials, no matter whether in the inner city or in a rural area or small town. There always seems to be a bundle of wood at the end of any project that is too good to burn, too junky to sell, and too insignificant to store. Put a lot of those bundles together and the picture changes to more and more practical possibilities of building materials for the public space.

Spare parts are fair game for the community warehouse. Thus it can serve as a parts cabinet for the community technology experimenters.^[93]

The general principle of import substitution also included vernacular construction techniques using locally available materials, what today would be called cohousing or land trusts, and — a position which would doubtless horrify any mainstream right-libertarian today — squatting or community expropriation of the unused properties of absentee owners.

—And new and better ways to build. Traditional housing codes and techniques have led to waves of so-called urban renewal or, in many cases, urban dislocation. But many townspeople have begun to wonder if just tearing down part of a town is real progress after all. Making better use of existing housing is an alternative. A community study could be made to show how. And would the community be better served by a system of community-controlled, perhaps individual neighborhood housing plans than by large-scale plans often drawn by outsiders? What good or bad effects would there be to the use of innovative rather than traditional building techniques? Would community-controlled real estate firms help ease the problems of runaway speculation?^[94]

—Do unused properties, held for speculation, present a clear and present danger to town survival and stability? If they do, if space is wasted for the profit of people who may not even live in the town, or if the future of the many is balanced dangerously on the speculation of a few, the community might want to consider, for example, new programs of urban homesteading, with unused properties being returned to productive and locally needed use by people in the actual neighborhoods involved.^[95]

Morris’ and Hess’s model by which “repair shops begin to transform themselves into basic manufacturing facilities”^[96] was virtually identical to Jane Jacobs’ description of import substitution in the Japanese bicycle industry. In fact they actually used bicycles as an illustration:

It is best, perhaps, to move gradually from one step in the production process to another. A bicycle collective might be established on the retail level. Then maintenance facilities might be added. After a number of people have learned the skills in repairs in a neighborhood, a factory could be initiated to produce a few vital parts, like chains or wheels or tires. Finally, if the need arises, full-scale production of bicycles could be attempted.^[97]

They also suggested gradually filling in gaps in the supply chains of existing industries.

In the food sector we might start with the retail collectives, then add trucking distribution networks and warehouse storage areas. Later some food could be raised directly in the community. A canning factory might be set up to teach people to gain the advantage of low-priced fruits and vegetables in season all year round, by buying during the summer and eating during the winter. Finally, a glass recycling unit might be set up, at first to trade broken bottles for usable jars on an arrangement with the bottling companies, later possibly to produce the jars themselves.^[98]

Besides all this Morris and Hess speculated on forms of currency that simply served as units of account for coordinating flows of goods between producers, rather than being issued against stockpiled wealth. They quoted Alan Watts:

Remember the Great Depression of the Thirties? One day there was a flourishing consumer economy, with everyone on the up-and-up; and the next: poverty, unemployment and breadlines. What happened? The physical resources of the country — the brain, brawn, and raw materials — were in no way depleted, but there was a sudden absence of money, a so-called financial slump. Complex reasons for this kind of disaster can be elaborated at lengths by experts in banking and high finance who cannot see the forest for the trees. But it was just as if someone had come to work on building a house and, on the morning of the Depression, the boss had to say, “Sorry, baby, but we can’t build today. No inches.” “Whaddya mean, no inches? We got wood. We got metal. We even got tape measures.” “Yeah, but you don’t understand business. We been using too many inches, and there’s just no more to go around.”^[99]

In addition to the creation of neighborhood industry and other economic institutions, social services, and organs of self-governance, Hess and Morris advocated “intercommunalism” — horizontal networks between local self-governing communities, as a way of bypassing the authority of the nation-state — in a way that anticipated federative projects of the new municipalist movement today.

There is… another dynamic at work, one that becomes increasingly powerful as time goes by. That is an outward movement, interconnecting many communities in the cities and even the world. It is a natural and almost inevitable tendency. While there are many who try to build citizenship into the neighborhood itself, there are others who try to build strong links among many communities, reinforcing each other in their struggles.^[100]

Intercommunal cooperation is necessary, among other reasons — as we’ve seen with recent actions by the Mississippi legislature against Cooperation Jackson, etc. — because of the potential for repression of isolated communities by central governments.

As the neighborhood, or neighborhoods, actually become effective political units — as they begin to attain an image as actually threatening to corporate profits, or entrenched political interests, or real-estate developers, or rich people — very powerful machinery of the state and its allies will be brought to bear on the tiny community. This might come on the bureaucratic level first. Housing inspectors may begin to investigate housing, citing obscure and not-so-obscure sanitary regulations. Health inspectors may begin to give community food stores or restaurants low scores on their reports, forcing investments in new machinery. Police may begin to survey the community very closely, making marijuana arrests, stopping cars, hassling drivers and pedestrians alike. This is the lowest level of harassment and the most common. If the neighborhood has made allies within the city bureaucracy and can deliver votes at election time, it can usually postpone these pressures until it gets on its feet. But — and it is important not to forget — this can only be postponed until the neighborhood gets on its feet. As it begins to sever its relations with major economic interests, and builds its own wealth, the votes it delivers may not be as important as the money that the economic interests can deliver in the municipal arena.^[101]

Once cities begin to move against national economic or political interests…, they too will be caught up in the sort of dilemma that neighborhoods face, one of tackling organizations infinitely more powerful than themselves….

Rather than continually moving up the political ladder, we suggest that cities have quite enough resources to deal with most issues, and that they should begin interconnecting with other cities, just as neighborhoods have done, when they are fighting major interest groups. Cities do have the wherewithal to develop their own worldwide communications networks. They can develop their own industries, and work in association with other cities around the world when their interests are threatened by multinational corporations.^[102]

Intercommunal organizations, among other things, could coordinate economic ties between local communities in areas where a function could not be carried out with the resources of individual communities. For example:

From this base we can establish intercommunal links with other countries, villages, neighborhoods, or communes, to begin a dialogue about mutual needs and support. On a domestic scale this outreach might grow out of trade patterns. Trucking cooperatives might begin to make contractual arrangements with co-op food producers in other parts of the region to buy their food in bulk, store it at a central warehouse, and distribute it through buying clubs, collectives, or local, sympathetic businesses. Arrangements could be made with federations of small farmers to pick up their produce on a regular schedule….

These economic links should be combined with communication links. A coal miners’ strike can be supported by urban dwellers and vice versa.^[103]

The Community Technology project made significant efforts to put many of these ideas into practice.

Attempts at food sovereignty included neighborhood gardens in vacant lots and on rooftops (Adams-Morgan was a neighborhood of mostly three-story row houses with flat roofs).^[104] The most ambitious project was a basement trout farm, of which Hess was justifiably proud.

Jeffrey Woodside, our resident physicist and jack-of-all-trades; his immensely energetic friend Esther Siegal; our chemist, Fern Wood Mitchell; and Therese built tanks of fiberglass-covered plywood, arranged water recirculation with pumps from discarded washing machines, and contrived filters for the fish waste made of boxes filled with calcite chips (the standard marble chips sold in garden supply stores) into which a few cups of ordinary vacant-lot soil had been poured to provide a bumptious strain of nitrifying bacteria to feed on the ammonia in the fish waste.

The bacteria kept the water clean, the pumps and some well-placed baffles kept the tank water moving in a strong current, the fish (which we first reared from eggs in ordinary aquarium tanks) swam strongly, ate heartily of the commercial feed that we first used as a convenience, and grew as fast as fish in streams. Surprisingly to us, the rate at which they converted their feed to flesh was better than one ounce of fish for each two ounces of food, about 500 percent more efficient than beef cattle, and as good as that champion barnyard converter, the chicken. Our installation, neatly tailored to urban basements, produced five pounds of fish per cubic foot of water. A typical basement in the neighborhood could produce about three tons annually at costs substantially below grocery store prices.^[105]

Other hardware design projects included bacteriological toilets, solar cookers, and passive solar collectors made of discarded cans for interior heating.

The group generally began discussing the design of a shopping cart that could be built in the neighborhood; a self-powered platform that would handle most of the neighborhood’s heavy moving chores; a neighborhood chemical factory to make household cleaners, disinfectants, insecticides, and aspirin; and a neighborhood methanol plant to take local garbage and turn it into a portable fuel with properties roughly similar to gasoline.^[106]

The range of other projects on the AMO’s drawing board anticipated later municipalist projects like Cooperation Jackson.

Next on the neighborhood agenda are crime prevention actions (neighborhood patrols, youth programs run by and not for young people, and whatever else the apparently endless ingenuity of the neighbors can come up with). Also, a committee is forming to start a health-training and service center, and a co-op real estate office. There already is an exemplary co-op grocery store, record store, and a video center which uses portable tape machines as a way for people to engage in what amounts to an audiovisual debate about anything and everything that affects their lives.

Also, there is a highly regarded therapeutic community of recovered drug users; a credit union; a community assistance cooperative for Spanish-speaking people; two nonprofit weekly newspapers; a woodworking guild; a prisoner-release program and an “alternatives to prison” program; plans for a co-op pharmacy and for a co-op hardware store; a brilliantly innovative community studies program through Communitas College, also in the neighborhood; volunteer work by Antioch law school students, also in the neighborhood; and a growing feeling that when you say hello to someone on the streets the greeting has new and neighborly meaning.^[107]

Although the Community Technology project fell apart for lack of a sufficient base of local support, it demonstrated “that an urban neighborhood could be self-sufficient in the production of food and wealth.”^[108]

Having failed to sell alternative technology to a majority of people in a neighborhood, Hess next shifted to an informal project with a distributed membership consisting entirely of self-selected participants who had already bought in to the idea. He and Therese moved to rural West Virginia in 1975. Aside from pouring the foundation, digging the well and bringing in a power line, they did essentially all the construction work on their new home themselves, to a large extent incorporating vernacular materials and passive solar design.^[109]

Hess and Therese established the Appropriate Technology Group in 1976, a network serving the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia,

bringing members together on a monthly basis at different homes and at various project sites to share technological information and to help one another with tools, projects, and problems. Our show-and-tell project was our house, its efficient use of energy, and its innovative construction. An array of other projects, ranging from organic cattle farming to building a functioning duplicate of the locally famous James Rumsey steamboat, kept us engaged in a constant process of learning and creating.^[110]

His reputation from this project resulted in election or appointment to a number of positions, including membership in the West Virginia Academy of Sciences, the Appropriate Technology Task Force of the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, and the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Appropriate Technology.^[111]

Even during his right-wing phase — an evolution already well underway when he moved to West Virginia — this fondness for decentralized technology never left him. Writing his autobiography, in the last years of his life, he enthused:

Here is where tools and technology seem so liberating; they are moving toward decentralized deployment. Cottage industry now includes gene splicers and cybernated milling machines, not to mention endless attics of retrievable data. More importantly, tools and technology are moving toward miniaturization, a key feature that makes it possible to decentralize their deployment and command. Decentralization, these are the undoing of central power, the features that must strike terror in the heart of any old-fashioned tyrant.^[112]

Conclusion

Over a period of several years, some time back, I wrote a series of studies for C4SS on the common theme of “anarchists without adjectives.” My descriptions of Colin Ward and David Graeber in terms of that ethos will, I hope, give some idea of what I mean by it:

Like Kropotkin’s, Ward’s was a communism expressed in a love for a wide variety of small folk institutions, found throughout the nooks and crannies of history, of a sort most people would not think of when they hear the term “communism.” Kropotkin himself resembled William Morris in his fondness for the small-scale, local, quaint and historically rooted — especially medieval folkmotes, open field villages, free towns, guilds, etc. — as expressions of the natural communism of humanity.^[113]

David Graeber chose, as the epigraph to his book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, a quote from Pyotr Kropotkin’s article on Anarchism for the Encyclopedia Britannica. In it Kropotkin stated that, in an anarchist society, harmony would be

“obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free arrangements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.”

The interesting thing about this is that it could serve as an accurate description of virtually any anarchist society, including the libertarian communist sort favored by Kropotkin, Goldman, or Malatesta, the kind of anarcho-syndicalism favored by most of the Wobblies and CNT, the anarcho-collectivism of Bakunin, the mutualism of Proudhon, or the market anarchism of Thomas Hodgskin and Benjamin Tucker. And it’s appropriate that Graeber chose it as his epigraph, because his affection for “freely constituted groups” and the “free arrangements” concluded between them is bigger than any doctrinaire attempt to pigeonhole such groups and arrangements as business firms operating in the cash nexus or moneyless collectives.

Graeber… is characterized above all by a faith in human creativity and agency, and an unwillingness to let a priori theoretical formulations either preempt his perceptions of the particularity and “is-ness” of history, or interfere with the ability of ordinary, face-to-face groupings of people on the spot to develop workable arrangements — whatever they may be — among themselves. Graeber is one of those anarchist (or anarchist-ish) thinkers who, despite possibly identifying with a particular hyphenated variant of anarchism, have an affection for the variety and particularity of self-organized, human-scale institutions that goes beyond ideological label. These people, likewise, see the relationships between individual human beings in ways that can’t be reduced to simple abstractions like the cash nexus or doctrinaire socialism….

Graeber’s anarchism is, above all else, human-centered. It entails a high regard for human agency and reasonableness. Rather than fitting actual human beings into some idealized anarchist paradigm, he displays an openness to — and celebration of — whatever humans may actually do in exercising that agency and reasonableness. Anarchy isn’t what people will do “after the Revolution,” when some sort of “New Anarchist Man” has emerged who can be trusted with autonomy; it’s what they do right now. “Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.”^[114]

If that were still a going project, I might have included this study of Karl Hess in it. Certainly in his middle phase, his New Left and communitarian periods, it’s beyond dispute that Hess perfectly fit the anarchist-without-adjectives paradigm. His vision was not so much of any “ism,” as of a world of a thousand and one homely, human-scale institutions by which people managed their own lives. For him corporate capitalism of both the conservative and liberal-managerialist variety, and state socialism of the Soviet variety, were acts of violence against this flesh and blood humanity. As he wrote in Dear America:

People, as individuals, may disappear from view in various social theories, but they never disappear in social practice. They persist. They have names, or at least identities. They have passions, quirks, size, shape, hands and heads. They can be attached to the punched cards of a time clock or the identity cards of a police state, or the chains of a slave system. But they remain in reality.^[115]

My vision of freedom, then, is formed around the rights of natural association, of people coming together in community for perhaps varied reasons, even for accidental geographic reasons. It is formed from the observed ability of people to decide for themselves, in such a natural association, how best to get along together, how to work, how to play, how to make divisions between those things which are wanted to be done alone and those wanted to be done together, and so forth.

The vision emphasizes being a person and doing things in a specific time and place.^[116]

And beyond that he was also, to a great extent, an anarchist without adjectives in his earlier and later right-wing phases as well — if only in spite of himself.

 

Endnotes

^[1] Karl Hess, Mostly On the Edge: An Autobiography. Edited by Karl Hess, Jr. (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999), pp. 36-37, 136-138, 157.

^[2] Ibid., pp. 38-39.

^[3] Ibid., p. 41.

^[4] Ibid., p. 134.

^[5] Ibid., p. 245.

^[6] Ibid., pp. 57-58.

^[7] Ibid., p. 193.

^[8] Ibid., pp. 134-135.

^[9] Ibid., p. 235.

^[10] Ibid., p. 190.

^[11] Jeff Riggenbach, “Karl Hess and the Death of Politics,” Libertarianism.org, September 20, 2021 <https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/karl-hess-and-death-politics>.

^[12] Daniel Burton, “Interview With Samuel Edward Konkin III” (2002) <http://www.spaz.org/~dan/individualist-anarchist/software/konkin-interview.html>.

^[13] Samuel Edward Konkin III, “History of the Libertarian Movement” (n.d.) <https://web.archive.org/web/19990429142502/http://www.loop.com/~sek3/nl/history.html>. Unfortunately, however, I’ve never seen Konkin’s account of the SDS dissidents’ role corroborated by any other source.

^[14] Karl Hess, Dear America (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1975), p. 101.

^[15] Ibid., pp. 101-102.

^[16] Hess, Mostly On the Edge, p. 26.

^[17] Milton Kotler, Final Impressions (Broad Branch Books, 2018). Kindle edition, pp. 54-55.

^[18] Stephen Clapp, “The Intellectual Bombthrowers,” The Washingtonian (December 1969), p. 4.

^[19] Ken Western, personal email, June 28, 2023.

^[20] Western, personal email.

^[21] John Chamberlain, “These Days: Is Conservative Turning to New Left?” Fort Myers News-Press, January 17, 1969.

^[22] Karl Hess, “Letter from a Right-winger,” The Realist No. 74 (May 1967), p. 2 <https://www.ep.tc/realist/pdf/the-realist-074.pdf>.

^[23] Karl Hess, “The Death of Politics,” Playboy, March 1969. Reproduced at Mises.org <https://mises.org/library/death-politics>.

^[24] Hess, Mostly On the Edge, pp. 183-184.

^[25] Ibid., p. 184.

^[26] Ibid., p. 192.

^[27] Riggenbach, “Karl Hess and the Death of Politics.”

^[28]  Ibid. Actually, as we will see, Hess’s position at Libertarian Forum came to a de facto end in November 1969.

^[29] Hess, Dear America, p. 9.

^[30] Karl Hess, “Letter From Washington: The Coming White Terror,” Libertarian Forum, Vol. 1 No. 5 (June 1, 1969), pp. 2-3.

^[31] Karl Hess, “Letter From Washington: Where Are The Specifics?” Libertarian Forum Vol. 1 No. 6 (June 15, 1969), p. 2. The “Tijerina situation” referred to an attempt by activist Reies Tijerina to occupy and reclaim the New Mexican land grants by the descendants of the original Spanish and Mexican settlers. “Reies Tijerina,” Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reies_Tijerina>. Accessed June 27, 2023. Rothbard’s own “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle” article is today itself a scandal among many on the libertarian right. As the Mises Institute paleocons never tire of informing me, Rothbard later repudiated his views on expropriating corporate property. And so he did, to be sure — just as he also repudiated most shreds of decency in his later paleo years, when he took up residence in the same septic tank as Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell.

^[32] Karl Hess, “Letter From Washington: Robin Hood Revisionism,” Libertarian Forum Vol. 1 No. 15 (November 1, 1969), p. 4.

^[33] Karl Hess, “Letter From Washington: What The Movement Needs,” Libertarian Forum Vol. 1 No. 7 (July 1, 1969), p. 2.

^[34] Karl Hess, “Letter From Washington: Reform,” Libertarian Forum Vol. 1 No. 11 (September 1, 1969), p. 2.

^[35] Murray Rothbard, “ULTRA-LEFTISM,” Libertarian Forum Vol. 1 No. 16 (November 15, 1969), pp. 1-2.

^[36] Karl Hess, “Letter From Washington: Cults and Criticisms,” Libertarian Forum Vol. 1 No. 18 (November 15, 1969), p. 2.

^[37] Murray Rothbard, “Anarcho-Communism,” Libertarian Forum Vol. 2 No. 1 (January 1, 1970), p. 1.

^[38] Murray Rothbard, “The New Left, RIP,” Libertarian Forum Vol. 2 No. 6 (March 15, 1970), p. 1.

^[39] Rothbard, “THE MAD BOMBERS,” Libertarian Forum Vol. 2 No. 7 (April 1, 1970), p. 1.

^[40] Rothbard, “Farewell To The Left,” Libertarian Forum Vol. 2 No. 9 (May 1, 1970), p. 1.

^[41] Hess, Dear America, p. 1.

^[42] Ibid., p. 50.

^[43] Ibid., p. 14.

^[44] Ibid., p. 19.

^[45] Ibid., p. 3.

^[46] Ibid., p. 22.

^[47] Ibid., pp. 213-214.

^[48] Ibid., pp. 214-215.

^[49] Kevin A. Carson, The Thought of Ivan Illich: A Libertarian Analysis (Center for a Stateless Society, 2023) <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FABeJ8kq-b17BbNYA1vh64HgKXvSuZsF/view>, pp. 3-4.

^[50] Hess, Dear America, p. 236.

^[51] Ibid., p. 68.

^[52] Ibid., p. 84.

^[53] Ibid., p. 276.

^[54] Ibid., pp. 59-60.

^[55] Hess, Mostly On the Edge, p. 35.

^[56] Hess, Dear America, p. 115.

^[57] Ibid., p. 116.

^[58] Ibid., pp. 118-119.

^[59] Ibid., p. 121.

^[60] Ibid., pp. 144-146.

^[61] Ibid., pp. 72-73.

^[62] Ibid., pp. 168-169.

^[63] Karl Hess, Community Technology (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 8.

^[64] Hess, Mostly On the Edge, p. 235.

^[65] Hess, Dear America, pp. 81-82.

^[66] Ibid., p. 155.

^[67] Ibid., pp. 205-206.

^[68] Ibid., p. 226.

^[69] Ibid., p. 248.

^[70] Ibid., pp. 243-244.

^[71] Ibid., pp. 249-250.

^[72] Hess, Mostly On the Edge, pp. 235-236; Dear America, p. 239.

^[73] Hess, Mostly On the Edge, p. 236.

^[74] Karl Hess, Community Technology (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 1, 4.

^[75] Ibid., p. 6.

^[76] Ibid., p. 19.

^[77] Ibid., pp. 20-21.

^[78] Open Source Ecology <https://www.opensourceecology.org/>; “Machines: Global Village Construction Set,” Open Source Ecology wiki <https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/>. Accessed July 1, 2023.

^[79] Hess, Dear America, p. 230.

^[80] Ibid., p. 260.

^[81] Hess, Community Technology, p. 21.

^[82] Ibid., pp. 21-22.

^[83] Hess, Dear America, p. 260.

^[84] Hess, Community Technology, pp. 22-23.

^[85] David Morris and Karl Hess, Neighborhood Power: The New Localism. Institute for Policy Studies (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), pp. 16-17.

^[86] Kotler, Neighborhood Government, quoted in Ibid., p. 48.

^[87] Hess, Dear America, p. 271.

^[88] Hess, Community Technology, p. 57.

^[89] Ibid., p. 56.

^[90] Morris and Hess, Neighborhood Power, p. 26.

^[91] Ibid., pp. 33-35.

^[92] Hess, Dear America, pp. 271-272.

^[93] Hess, Community Technology, pp. 59-60.

^[94] Hess, Dear America, p. 274.

^[95] Ibid., p. 274.

^[96] Morris and Hess, Neighborhood Power, p. 69.

^[97] Ibid., p. 142.

^[98] Ibid., pp. 142-143.

^[99] Ibid., pp. 154-155.

^[100] Ibid., p. 145.

^[101] Ibid., p. 148.

^[102] Ibid., pp. 151-152.

^[103] Ibid., pp. 153-154.

^[104] Hess, Community Technology, p. 28.

^[105] Ibid., pp. 28-29.

^[106] Ibid., p. 29.

^[107] Hess, Dear America, p. 238.

^[108] Hess, Mostly On the Edge, p. 237.

^[109] Ibid., pp. 243-245.

^[110] Ibid., p. 245.

^[111] Ibid., p. 245.

^[112] Ibid., p. 249.

^[113] Kevin A. Carson, The Anarchist Thought of Colin Ward (Center for a Stateless Society, 2014) <https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/colinward.pdf>, pp. 4-5.

^[114] Kevin A. Carson, David Graeber’s Anarchist Thought: A Survey (Center for a Stateless Society, 2014) <https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/graeber.pdf>, pp. 3-4.

^[115] Hess, Dear America, p. 193.

^[116] Karl Hess, Dear America (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1875), p. 263.

Ben Burgis and the Analytical Marxist Critique of Dialectics

The title of this essay recalls the Congressional hearing that took place on December 5, 2023, in which Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, seemed to dodge difficult questions by uttering the phrase “it depends on the context.” The phrase immediately became meme-able, even the butt of an opening “Saturday Night Live” skit. New York Times journalist A. O. Scott (2024) wrote that more than any other word, be it “plagiarism” or “genocide,” “Gay’s fate was sealed by a single word. … The word was ‘context’.” Scott’s larger point, of course, was that throughout the heated controversy, there was, in fact, a “rigorous avoidance of context” — the context of election-year politics, unending global conflicts, the crises in higher education, and so forth.

My purpose in this essay is not to relitigate that Congressional hearing. Rather, it is to focus on the method for which keeping context is primary. That method — dialectics — addresses societal problems by exploring their many overlapping and shifting contexts in a dynamic world.

Interestingly, the issue of dialectics was recently highlighted in two essays written by Ben Burgis, published a month prior to those Congressional hearings. In “Cohen vs. Trotsky: Is Marxism Without Dialectics Really Like a Clock Without a Spring?” (Burgis 2023a) and “Rorty vs. Marx vs. Proudhon: Is it a ‘Pity’ that the Best Political Economist of the Nineteenth Century Majored in Philosophy?” (Burgis 2023b), and in two YouTube chats (Bertram-Lee and Burgis 2023a; 2023b), Burgis asks us to reconsider the dialectical method and its role in Marx’s thought. Much of his commentary derives from his book, Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left (2019). His points are worth reexamining here if only to advance the discussion of the role that dialectical methods play in our understanding of the larger context of our world — and our attempts to change it.

Ben Burgis and the Analytical Critique of Dialectics

In the first of his essays, Burgis (2023a) asks: “Is something called ‘the dialectical method’ central to Marxism? If not, is dialectics just Hegelian mumbo-jumbo that Marxism is better off without? Or are both of these unhelpful oversimplifications?” While acknowledging his indebtedness to the analytical Marxist, G. A. Cohen, who was an opponent of dialectics, Burgis presents his own nuanced take on the issues at hand.

He turns his attention to the perspectives of Leon Trotsky on the one hand and James Burnham and Richard Rorty on the other. Despite being highly critical of Stalin’s ‘betrayal’ of Bolshevism, Trotsky argued that the Russian revolution “still needed to be defended.” Dissidents in the Socialist Workers Party, such as Max Shachtman and James Burnham, were disillusioned by the Hitler-Stalin pact. Burnham authored a critique of dialectics, to which Trotsky replied in his monograph, “In Defense of Marxism” (1939). Trotsky declared “that ‘Marxism without dialectics’ would be like ‘a clock without a spring.’” For Trotsky, dialectics served as a requisite guide to Marxists moving forward.

In later years, Burgis recounts, Richard Rorty published an essay on Marx and Derrida — “A Spectre is Haunting the Intellectuals” — in which he declared that it’s a “pity” that “the best political economist of the nineteenth century happened to major in philosophy, and never quite got over it.” Rorty dismissed dialectics as “a source of embarrassment to Marx’s latter-day admirers.” Burgis maintains that Cohen ([1978] 2000), while not as hardcore as Rorty, remains “borderline Rorty-esque” in his critique of dialectics. Cohen’s book, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, was in many respects, one of the founding documents of the analytical philosophical turn in Marxist thought in the late twentieth century. As Burgis argues, “Cohen isn’t taking a position one way or the other on whether Marxism possesses such distinctive methods of discovering the truth. He’s asserting that either it doesn’t or, if it does, it’s better off without them. Put differently, he’s rejecting the conjunctive claim that Marxism has such a distinctive methodology, and that it should be retained. Elsewhere in the introduction he repeatedly associates this conjunctive claim with the idea that Marxism is, or should be, ‘dialectical.’” 

Burgis explains further that in their 1992 book, Reconstructing Marxism, analytical Marxists Eric Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober argued that dialectics is used by Marx more as metaphor than as a distinctive methodology. Burgis finds “more value in Marx’s dialectical ‘idiom’” than Cohen, even if he rejects (rightfully, in my view) the idea that dialectics constitutes Marxism’s “own special way of reaching the truth about history and politics and economics that’s radically different from the standard ways that anyone else examines evidence…” What’s needed is greater understanding of causal mechanisms and effects to which, for example, a key dialectical notion, that of “contradiction” is repurposed “as a way of explicating the interactions among a set of causal mechanisms,” as the authors of Reconstructing Marxism put it. 

Citing strategies developed by Wright, Levine, and Sober, Burgis fleshes out the various reciprocally reinforcing meanings implied by dialectical contradiction. It is “a situation in which there are multiple conditions for the reproduction of a system which cannot all be simultaneously satisfied.” It is also a situation “in which the unintended consequences of a strategy subvert the accomplishment of its intended goals” (a condition on which Friedrich Hayek focused so much attention). But it also pertains to an “underlying social antagonism that produces conflicts.” Burgis seeks to unpack these various meanings and to relate them to the demands of empirical demonstration and investigation “on a case-by-case basis.” 

It is certainly true that “contradiction” has been among the most muddled notions in dialectical parlance. Burgis points out that in “The ABCs of Materialist Dialectics,” Trotsky rejects the claims of standard logic. “Sounding a lot like Ayn Rand with the pluses and minuses reversed, he says that standard logic is flawed because of the assumption that A is A. While the claim that everything is identical to itself might sound not only true but mind-numbingly obvious and totally uninformative, he gives A being A the … strawman-ish interpretation that any given thing A doesn’t change over time.” 

Burgis (2023b) clearly understands that in dialectics, “contradiction” is not something that supersedes logic. Rather, it is used to convey “dynamic tension between opposing elements in a system.” In this sense, dialectical “contradictions” resemble what Aristotle would call relational “contraries.” For Aristotle, the genesis of change is, itself, a “coming-to-be” of “contraries” in and out of each other, simultaneously, so that their “mutual relations” provide the motive power for their development over time (On Generation and Corruption 2.4.331a6-16 in Aristotle 1984, 541). Contraries are often reciprocal preconditions and effects of one another (Sense and Sensibilia 4.441b12-14; 701). They become complementary relational units or correlatives. As an example of this principle, Aristotle enunciates what Robert Heilbroner (1987, 6) would have called the “relational opposition” between slave and master, for “the slave is called slave of a master and the master is called master of a slave” (11; Categories 7.6b27-30; 11) and neither can be isolated from its corresponding correlative. Each gains meaning through the relation. 

Quite apart from Aristotle’s justification of slavery (Politics 1.5; 1989-91), this key insight would be revisited by thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Marx, and Rand. Indeed, in The Fountainhead, Rand provides an eloquent demolition of the legitimacy of slavery and the impotency of masters, who sought to lay waste to those they enslaved. Of the master, she wrote: “You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. But a leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends” (Rand [1943] 2005, 691). I’ll have more to say about Rand a bit later.

Burgis has previously credited me for having better elucidated the relationship between dialectics and logic. As he writes in Give Them an Argument: “The best analysis I’ve seen of the relationship between the two kinds of ‘logic’ comes from Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s book Ayn Rand: Russian Radical. Sciabarra is far more sympathetic to his subject than I am, but he knows the history of philosophy well enough to push back against [Rand’s] view on this point.” He then cites a passage from Russian Radical that illuminates the issue and adds, “Sadly, Chris Sciabarra wasn’t around in 1939 to explain all this to Burnham and Trotsky. If he had been, they might have realized that they were talking past each other in the argument about ‘logic.’ Once that was cleared up, everyone involved could have gotten back to arguing about Russia” (Burgis 2019, 69–70).

Alas, if transported back to 1939, Ben Burgis would have been an even more formidable critic of those questioning the legitimacy of the law of noncontradiction. Indeed, he’s devoted far more time than me or anyone I know to the defense of classical logic against heterodox, nonclassical approaches. His 2022 book, Logic without Gaps or Gluts: How to Solve the Paradoxes without Sacrificing Classical Logic, is a testament to his rigorous studies on the subject.

Still, on the basics, it is worth emphasizing that in his formulation of the law of noncontradiction, Aristotle states that “the most certain principle of all is that regarding which it is impossible to be mistaken, … that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect,” and that in carrying out demonstration, this formulation is “an ultimate belief … the starting-point … for all the other axioms” (Metaphysics 4–3.1005b17–33 in Aristotle 1984, 1588). It wasn’t until the twelfth century that philosopher Antonius Andreas would claim that the law of noncontradiction implied even more fundamentally the law of identity, that “Every being is a being.” This was later formalized symbolically as “A is A” in the seventeenth century by Gottfied Wilhelm Leibniz (Bissell 2019, 54–55). Nowhere in Aristotelian thought can one find a denial of time and change as illusions. The law of noncontradiction as such incorporates notions of “time” (“at the same time”) and “context” (“in the same respect”) in its very formulation.  

Hence, I agree completely with Burgis that Trotsky’s denigration of “logic” to elevate “dialectics” is seriously mistaken. As I write in Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism: 

[D]ialectics … is not in opposition to logic, but rather is a fundamental complement to logic and, as such, cannot correctly be said either to undermine or to ‘transcend’ logic. The widespread failure to grasp this fact has resulted in the irony that dialectics has been as seriously jeopardized by some of those who have sought to preserve and extend it as by those who have endeavored to destroy it. Those so-called dialectical theorists who champion dialectics as ‘superior to’ logic fail to appreciate logic as the foundation of knowledge, an undeniable constituent of all concepts of method. Those who refer to dialectics as being ‘transcendent of’ the axiomatic laws of noncontradiction, excluded middle, and identity are thus speaking nonsense every bit as much as those who claim that dialectics is destructive of those laws. Defending the rightful status of dialectics … is thus made doubly difficult, because those most in need of keeping logic foundational to their dialectical inquiries do not think they need to, while those most capable of showing that logic is foundational to dialectics think that dialectics is antithetical to logic. Logic and dialectics are mutually implied: just as logic is the art of noncontradictory identification, dialectics is the art of context-keeping, and both arts entail various techniques for achieving these mutually reinforcing goals (Sciabarra 2000, 149).

Indeed, dialectics helped Aristotle to bolster the law of noncontradiction against skeptic challenges. This was an epistemic technique that undermined any attempts to escape or deny the validity of the principle for failure to consider time and context. Aristotle set the standard for context-keeping as vitally necessary even for the most basic method of thought and inquiry.

It is therefore no coincidence that Aristotle was celebrated by Hegel himself as the “fountainhead” of dialectical thinking. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel ([1840] 1995, 132) sees in Aristotle a thinking empiricist, who observes the world from “all sides,” from many “points of view,” grasping through investigation the “many aspects under which an object can be regarded.” Thereafter, Marx recognized Aristotle as “the greatest thinker of antiquity,” “the first to analyze so many forms, whether of thought, society, nature, and amongst them also the form of value” ([1867] 1967, 408, 59). Frederick Engels (1940) went further, dividing the history of philosophy between those “metaphysical” thinkers who viewed the world through “fixed categories” and those “dialectical” thinkers, “especially Aristotle and Hegel”, whose understanding was enriched with “fluid categories” (153). For Engels ([1878/1894] 1978, 29, 29 n), Aristotle was “the Hegel of the ancient world, … the most encyclopaedic intellect … [who] had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought.” And in Vladimir Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, one finds praise of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in which “everywhere, are the living germs of dialectics and inquiries about it” (in Selsam and Martel [1963] 1987, 361).

Trotsky clearly wasn’t reading his Marx, Engels, or Lenin. But he wasn’t alone. George Novack, whom Burgis also criticizes, wrote Introduction to the Logic of Marxism, which similarly attacked Aristotle’s “static” formalism of Identity that had been “superseded” by dialectical “logic” (Novack [1969] 1971, 18). This is precisely the kind of nonsense that gives dialectics a bad name.

Burgis (2023a) repudiates the attempt to anchor dialectics to a rejection of “the laws of logic as taught in regular bourgeois logic textbooks” and argues further that Marxists and non-Marxists alike must still contend with “standard cause-and-effect relationships” and evidence-based conclusions. He is particularly irked by Trotsky’s assertion that there is “no such thing as an ontologically real instant of time, only intervals of time that — however tiny — have some duration and contain change. Maybe he’s right about this and maybe he’s wrong. But it’s a very weird thing to be so sure of from the Marxist theoretician’s armchair. Isn’t this an empirical issue, best left to be fought over by theoretical physicists?” Indeed, some of these claims are implied even in the works of Engels, as Burgis notes, whose Dialectics of Nature comes close to seeing dialectics as Marxism’s “own special way of discovering the truth about absolutely everything.”

Of course, Trotsky’s main point, fully within the Marxist tradition, is to argue against “[t]he fundamental flaw of vulgar thought,” which is, indeed, marred by atomist and static assumptions, sometimes expressed in the form of “state of nature” theorizing or in the form of ahistorical perspectives that see the present as a “natural order,” disconnected from the past that shaped it, or from the many possible futures that might emerge from it. For Trotsky, notions of change and evolution are central to our analysis of “social and political realities.” Burgis accepts that “it’s important to be attuned to the particular features that systems exhibit at particular stages of their historical development, and the way that those particular features contain tensions that carry with them the seeds of future change. If that’s what differentiates dialectical thought from ‘vulgar thought,’ I’m for it.” And I should add: So am I!

In his follow-up essay on Rorty, Marx, and Proudhon, Burgis (2023b) argues that while the “claims some Marxists make for ‘the dialectical method’ are overblown and unconvincing [,] … Marx’s Hegelian background did help him see important things other critics of capitalism missed.” For Burgis, viewing social reality through a dialectical lens will allow us to notice certain things that “you might miss otherwise.” Though criticized by Marx, even Proudhon recognized how dialectical thinking highlights antinomies as both necessary and opposed to one other. With a touch of irony, Burgis adds that there are aspects of Proudhon’s book, The Philosophy of Poverty, that “read like they could be written by a Von Mises Institute sort of a libertarian — but the impression is misleading,” since Proudhon’s “‘mutualist’ alternative to capitalism is at least roughly similar to what’s advocated by some contemporary left libertarians like the Center for a Stateless Society crowd who provocatively call themselves ‘free market anti-capitalists’.” [1]

Bertell Ollman and the Reconstruction of Marx’s Dialectical Method

Despite my broad agreement with Burgis on many of these points, more needs to be said precisely about what dialectics is and why it is an important methodological tool.

My own approach to the dialectical method has been a direct outgrowth of my engagement with the work of Marxist theorist Bertell Ollman, whose first book, Alienation, fully explores “Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society.” I studied with Ollman for several years as both a graduate and doctoral student, taking courses with him on Marxism, fascism, dialectics, and social science methodology. He was my doctoral dissertation advisor and has been among my dearest friends and supporters, providing blurbs for all three books in my trilogy on dialectical libertarianism.

In my view, no writer has been more thorough than Ollman in the reconstruction of Marx’s dialectical method. Though my summary here cannot possibly convey the richness of Ollman’s work, his approach is nevertheless valuable insofar as it underscores key tenets of the dialectical method that are not fully captured in the writings of Burgis or the analytical Marxists.

In Alienation, Ollman ([1971] 1976, 3) argues that Marx often engages in a peculiar use of words, a reflection of his fluid meanings, drawn from complex processes of abstraction. It’s what led Vilfredo Pareto (1902, 332) to observe, in Ollman’s rendering, that “Marx’s words are like bats: one can see in them both birds and mice.” Ollman argues that Marx viewed each unit of his analysis, each problem or issue, as a cluster of relations, to be analyzed in terms of where it stands within the larger system in which it is embedded as well as its origins in the past, its present manifestations, and its many possible future implications.

The Hegelian notion of “Verhältnis,” roughly translated as “relation,” is crucial to Marx’s expansive conceptual arsenal. It encompasses many meanings: conditions, systems, structures, interactions, connections, as well as ties between parts that can be abstracted for the purposes of analysis but never reified (Ollman 1993, 38). Ollman (2003, 157) sees six successive aspects or “moments” to Marx’s dialectical approach: 

1. Ontologically, Marx begins with a basic assumption that social reality provides the larger context, within which there are an infinite number of mutually dependent processes. 
2. Epistemologically, Marx grasps this context through a process of abstraction. 
3. Understanding the main patterns of change and interaction requires a moment of inquiry, in which Marx uncovers and investigates empirical evidence and conveys the various patterns at work in their historically specific context. 
4. Before presenting that evidence, Marx engages in a moment of intellectual reconstruction, most evident in such works as the Grundrisse ([1857-58] 1973) in which he puts together the results of his research for the purposes of his own context: that of self-clarification. 
5. The moment of exposition — how Marx presents his findings to others — requires a strategy that considers the interests, knowledge, concerns, and values, that is, the specific context of the audience he is addressing. 
6. And, finally, there is the moment of praxis, in which Marx advocates our conscious action in the world — now more deeply understood in its fuller context as a structured whole or totality — changing it, testing it, and deepening our understanding of it in the process.

These integrated moments enable Marx to grasp the larger context as a system of organically linked parts: each part is expressive of the totality, even as the totality is composed of the interrelated parts. It is through these successive moments that Marx presents capitalism’s organic and historical evolution, in which its interrelated factors are viewed as both preconditions and effects of one another. 

The epistemological moment, however, is profoundly important. Gaining knowledge of the ties among parts requires processes of abstraction, as well as a reflection on the ways in which our abstractions impact our beliefs, attitudes, and actions — because we are always a part of the context we are attempting to understand.

Ollman examines in detail how Marx engages in these processes of abstraction. There are three main forms of abstraction: 1) abstraction by extension of units; 2) abstraction by vantage point; and 3) abstraction by levels of generality. In Marx’s analysis, each unit or part is presented as an extension of the system within which it is situated. Moreover, each unit is also viewed in terms of its development over time. Any component of the system — be it markets, states, classes, and so forth — can be abstracted as a unit with a past, present, and several possible futures. In abstraction by vantage point, Marx views the units of the system through altered points of view. For example, he traces the interactions among the units as seen from the perspective of capital or labor and the material context that conditions their interrelationships. In abstraction by levels of generality, Marx provides us with different ways of comprehending people and the social problems with which they grapple. Ollman (1993, 55) sees seven levels of generality on display in Marx’s analysis, that is, seven different perspectival contexts by which to view people. On level 1, people are viewed in terms of their specific qualities, ones that they and they alone possess as individuals; level 2 brings in the qualities they possess as part of modern capitalism; level 3, qualities they possess as part of capitalism in general (that is, as an evolved systemic form over the last several centuries); level 4, qualities they possess as part of a class society; level 5, qualities they possess as part of a human society; level 6, qualities they possess as part of the animal world; level 7, qualities they possess as objects in the material world. Ollman argues that Marx is typically focused on level 3 and, to a lesser extent, on levels 2 and 4, avoiding the most individualized or generalized explanations, while stressing the historically specific social conditions within which people live and produce. 

For Marx, there is no synoptic vantage point from which to grasp all social reality. As I have argued in Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, this is a principle that Hayek shares with Marx in his critique of “constructivist” rationalism and the “synoptic delusion.” Moreover, no abstraction — be it of extension, vantage point, or level of generality — can be reified as a whole unto itself. In each instance of abstraction, we are provided with a different way of grasping the object of our inquiry. In the integrated totality of our abstractions, we emerge with an understanding of the fuller context.

 Throughout the history of the dialectical method, it is this attention to context that is its defining characteristic, which is why I view dialectics as “the art of context-keeping.”  

Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism 

I am delighted that Burgis has brought attention to the many confusions and misunderstandings surrounding dialectics — not only in its relationship to Marxism but in its relationship to philosophical and social inquiry.

I wholeheartedly agree with Burgis that dialectics is neither distinctive to, nor the exclusive domain of, Marxist theory. Indeed, if it is a valid tool for understanding and interpreting our world, a nontrivial aspect of what it means to engage in critical thinking, then it can be shown that theorists throughout intellectual history have used its methods, with varying degrees of success, quite apart from Marxist presuppositions. It is no coincidence that Bertell Ollman — who once served as a Volker Fellow under Hayek at the University of Chicago — urged me to explore those dialectical motifs in classical liberal and libertarian thought. What emerged was a trilogy of works: Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (1995); Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical ([1995] 2013); and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000).

In the first of these works, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, an outgrowth of a portion of my doctoral dissertation, I argue that despite their profound differences, Marx and Hayek shared a dialectical critique of constructivist, utopian thinking, and a commitment to radical social analysis, in which social problems are viewed as a cluster of relations abstracted across multiple dimensions. For both Marx and Hayek, human beings are as much the creatures of their context as they are its creators. 

Ollman further inspired me to engage in an in-depth historical investigation of Rand’s origins, which led to the publication of the second book in my trilogy and a series of extensive archival essays thereafter (including Sciabarra and Solovyev 2021). As a beneficiary of the richness of Silver Age Russia and in engagement with an impressive array of professors in history, philosophy, and the social sciences, Rand was exposed to and educated in dialectical methods in texts and courses throughout her years at the University of Petrograd. In deploring Rand’s work, as Burgis clearly does, one might also completely miss the dialectical breadth of what she was trying to accomplish. Sensitive to such potential oversight, I have reconstructed Rand’s analysis of social relations of power across three modalities: the personal, the cultural, and the structural (political-economic). Though Rand often rendered her views in polemical black-and-white, either/or terms, her thought itself is a direct response to what she saw as the false alternatives of mind and body, reason and emotion, fact and value, theory and practice, the moral and the practical, the personal and the political. Moreover, she explicitly attacks the fundamental dualisms of modernity, such as: rationalism vs. empiricism; intrinsicism vs. subjectivism; materialism vs. idealism; atomistic individualism vs. organic collectivism; and conventional egoism (the sacrifice of others to oneself) vs. traditional altruism (the sacrifice of self to others). 

In the finale of my trilogy, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, I reconstruct the history and meaning of dialectical thinking, while engaging in a critical exegesis of the work of libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard who, despite showing significant dialectical elements in his analysis of class and structural crisis, falls victim to a nondialectical and ultimately utopian resolution. The epilogue to that book spells out the many promising dialectical insights of contemporary libertarian thinkers whose interdisciplinary engagement with social psychology, culture, politics, and economics stands in opposition to atomist, reductionist, and ahistorical statics.

As an extension of this dialectical libertarian turn, I was also a coeditor (with Roger Bissell and Edward Younkins) of The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom, which includes contributions from many writers whose work can be found at the Center for a Stateless Society, an organization cited by Burgis (2023a) in his essay on “Cohen vs. Trotsky.”

Marxist theorist Roy Bhaskar (1993, 385) once proclaimed that “Dialectics … is the pulse of freedom.” While I know that there are many substantive disagreements between Marxists and dialectical left-libertarians on what constitutes that other problematic word, “freedom,” it is my conviction that the dialectical method is indispensable to our investigation of those contexts that undermine it and those contexts that nourish it.  

It really does depend on the context, after all.

Notes

1. For an alternative, left-libertarian take on historical materialism, see Eric Fleischmann’s essay, “Historical Materialism: A Brief Overview and Left-Libertarian Reinterpretation” ([2022] 2023) and the accompanying piece “The Individual in Marxist (and Proudhonian) Social Analysis” (2023), which build on a diverse array of sources — from Bertell Ollman, Mario Cutajar, Antonio Gramsci, and Antonio Negri to Laurance Labadie, Kevin Carson, David Graeber, and Murray Rothbard — synthesized toward a dialectical resolution to the “one-sided” reductionism of both vulgar Marxist materialism and libertarian idealism. Fleischmann uses concepts such as polycentricity, confederation, and mutualism in crafting a non-state-centered, left-libertarian market socialism, which shows “a respect for local practices and a denial of the possibility of totalizing control.” Burgis (2024) also discusses historical materialism in the wake of contributions from Wright, Levine, and Sober (1992).

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to Roger Bissell, Eric Fleischmann, and Evan Pierce for their helpful commentary on an earlier draft of this essay. The usual caveats apply.

References

Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Revised Oxford translation, Bollingen Series LXXI-2. 2 vols. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bertram-Lee, Stefan and Ben Burgis. 2023a. “Marx vs. Proudhon.” Philosophy for the People (23 April).

———.  2023b. “Marx vs. Proudhon vs. Rorty.” Philosophy for the People (26 November). 

Bhaskar, Roy. 1993. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London: Verso.

Bissell, Roger E. 2019. “Ayn Rand and the Lost Axiom of Aristotle: A Philosophical Mystery—Solved?” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies19, no. 1 (July): 47–82.

Bissell, Roger E., Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Edward W. Younkins, eds. 2019. The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.

Burgis, Ben. 2019. Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left. Alresford, Hampshire, U.K.: Zero Books.

———. 2022. Logic without Gaps or Gluts: How to Solve the Paradoxes without Sacrificing Classical Logic. New York: Springer. (The author is listed as Benjamin Alan Burgis for this title.)

———. 2023a. “Cohen vs. Trotsky: Is Marxism Without Dialectics Really Like a Clock Without a Spring?”Philosophy for the People (5 November). 

———. 2023b. “Rorty vs. Marx vs. Proudhon: Is it a ‘Pity’ that the Best Political Economist of the Nineteenth Century Majored in Philosophy?” (26 November).

———. 2024. “Historical Materialism in the 1990s.” Philosophy for the People (14 January). 

Cohen, G. A. [1978] 2000. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Expanded edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Engels, Frederick. [1878/1894] 1978. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

———. 1940. Dialectics of Nature. Translated and edited by Clemens Dutt, with a preface and notes by J. B. S. Haldane. New York: International Publishers.

Fleischmann, Eric. [2022] 2023. “Historical Materialism: A Brief Overview and Left-Libertarian Reinterpretation” (Third Edition). The essay’s first edition was published on 26 May 2022.

———. 2023. “The Individual in Marxist (and Proudhonian) Social Analysis” (5 August). 

Hegel, G. W. F. [1840] 1995. Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 — Plato and the Platonists. Translated by E. S. Haldane and Francis H. Simson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Heilbroner, Robert. 1987. “The Dialectical Approach to Philosophy.” In The Main Debate: Communism versus Capitalism. Edited by Tibor R. Machan. New York: Random House.

Marx, Karl. [1857-58] 1973. Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus. New York: International Publishers.

———. [1867] 1967. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I: The Process of Capitalist Production. Edited by Frederick Engels. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers.

Ollman, Bertell. [1971] 1976. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1993. Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge.

———. 2003. Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Pareto, Vilfredo. 1902. Les Systèmes socialistes, II. Paris: V. Giard and E. Brière.

Rand, Ayn. [1943] 2005. The Fountainhead. New York: Plume.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. 1995. Marx, Hayek, and Utopia. Albany: State University of New York Press.

———. [1995] 2013. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. Second edition. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

———. 2000. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew and Pavel Solovyev. 2021. “The Rand Transcript Revealed.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 21, no. 2 (December): 141–229.

Scott, A. O. 2024. “The Word That Undid Claudine Gay.” New York Times (3 January).

Selsam, Howard and Harry Martel, eds. [1963] 1987. Reader in Marxist Philosophy from the Writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. New York: International Publishers.

Wright, Erick Olin, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober. 1992. Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History. London: Verso.

Originale: Kevin Carson, The Thought of Ivan Illich: A Libertarian Analysis. Traduzione italiana di Enrico Sanna

Versione stampabile pdf

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Nota del traduttore

Per le citazioni tratte dai libri di Ivan Illich mi sono basato, per quanto mi è stato possibile, sulle edizioni in italiano. In alcuni casi, soprattutto quando le citazioni sono molto brevi, non sono riuscito a individuare il corrispondente italiano della citazione inglese. In questo caso ho tradotto dall’inglese. Le edizioni italiane si possono trovare come ristampa e/o in formato digitale su internet. Per questo lavoro, mi sono servito delle seguenti edizioni digitali facilmente reperibili su internet. Trattandosi di edizioni digitali, non riporto il numero della pagina.

• Ivan Illich, La convivialità. Una proposta libertaria per una politica dei limiti allo sviluppo, Red Edizioni, 2013.

•  Ivan Illich, Descolarizzare la società. Una società senza scuola è possibile?, Mimesis, 2019.

• Ivan Illich, Disoccupazione creativa. Un nuovo equilibrio tra le attività svincolate dalle leggi di mercato e il diritto all’impiego, Red Edizioni, 2013.

• Ivan Illich, Lavoro ombra, tradotto da Francesco Saba Sardi, senza editore, 1980.

• Ivan Illich, Nello specchio del passato. Le radici storiche dei moderni concetti di pace, economia, sviluppo, linguaggio, salute, educazione, Boroli Editore, 2005.

• Ivan Illich, Nemesi medica. La paradossale nocività di un sistema medico che non conosce limiti, Red Edizioni, 2013.

• Ivan Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni, Mondadori, 1981.

Introduzione: due tipi di società

“Età industriale” è il termine che Illich usa più spesso per indicare la società o il modo di produzione da lui sottoposto a critica. Il tema principale dell’opera che si prometteva di scrivere è, come dice lui stesso, “un’epilogo dell’età industriale”.

Vorrei ritrarre come è venuto declinando il monopolio del modo di produzione industriale, e la metamorfosi subita dalle professioni che esso genera e nutre.

Soprattutto intendo dimostrare questo: che i due terzi dell’umanità possono ancora evitare di passare per l’età industriale se sceglieranno sin d’ora un modo di produzione fondato su un equilibrio postindustriale, quello stesso al quale i paesi sovraindustrializzati dovranno ricorrere di fronte alla minaccia del caos.¹

Secondo Illich esistono due modi alternativi di organizzare la società, da lui indicati generalmente con gli aggettivi “industriale” (o “manipolatorio”) e “conviviale”, a seconda di come le scoperte scientifiche vengono destinate ai fini sociali.

Siamo talmente deformati dalle abitudini industriali che non osiamo più scrutare il campo del possibile, e l’idea di rinunciare alla produzione di massa di tutti gli articoli e servizi è per noi come un ritorno alle catene del passato o al mito del buon selvaggio. Ma se vogliamo ampliare il nostro angolo di visuale, adeguandolo alle dimensioni della realtà, dobbiamo ammettere che non esiste un unico modo di utilizzare le scoperte scientifiche, ma per lo meno due, tra loro antinomici.

C’è un uso della scoperta che conduce alla specializzazione dei compiti, alla istituzionalizzazione dei valori, alla centralizzazione del potere: l’uomo diviene l’accessorio della megamacchina, un ingranaggio della burocrazia. Ma c’è un secondo modo di mettere a frutto l’invenzione, che accresce il potere e il sapere di ognuno, consentendo a ognuno di esercitare la propria creatività senza per questo negare lo stesso spazio d’iniziativa e di produttività agli altri.²

La seconda alternativa, la società conviviale, è una società “in cui lo strumento moderno sia utilizzabile dalla persona integrata con la collettività, e non riservato a un corpo di specialisti…³” (Nell’originale, Illich usa il termine “politico” nel senso democratico deliberativo con cui Murray Bookchin propugnava il suo esempio di municipalismo libertario: qui il concetto di politico incorpora anche quello che per molti anarchici è il “sociale”).

Intendo per convivialità il contrario della produttività industriale. Ognuno di noi si definisce nel rapporto con gli altri e con l’ambiente e per la struttura di fondo degli strumenti che utilizza. Questi strumenti si possono ordinare in una serie continua avente a un estremo lo strumento dominante e all’estremo opposto lo strumento conviviale: il passaggio dalla produttività alla convivialità è il passaggio dalla ripetizione della carenza alla spontaneità del dono. Il rapporto industriale è riflesso condizionato, risposta stereotipa dell’individuo ai messaggi emessi da un altro utente, che egli non conoscerà mai, o da un ambiente artificiale.⁴

Gli strumenti sono ciò che serve i fini dell’individuo, dunque non è l’individuo ad adattarsi ai requisiti degli strumenti al fine di servire i bisogni di un’istituzione. “La società conviviale è una società che dà all’uomo la possibilità di esercitare l’azione più autonoma e creativa, con l’ausilio di strumenti meno controllabili da altri.⁵” E ancora:

Lo strumento è inerente al rapporto sociale. Allorché agisco in quanto uomo, mi servo di strumenti. A seconda che io lo padroneggi o che viceversa ne sia dominato, lo strumento mi collega o mi lega al corpo sociale. Nella misura in cui io padroneggio lo strumento, conferisco al mondo un mio significato; nella misura in cui lo strumento mi domina, è la sua struttura che mi plasma e informa la rappresentazione che io ho di me stesso. Lo strumento conviviale è quello che mi lascia il più ampio spazio ed il maggior potere di modificare il mondo secondo le mie intenzioni. Lo strumento industriale mi nega questo potere; di più: attraverso di esso, è un altro diverso da me che determina la mia domanda, restringe il mio margine di controllo e governa il mio senso della vita. La maggior parte degli strumenti che mi circondano oggi non può essere utilizzata in modo conviviale.⁶

…Socialmente parlando, dovremmo riservare il termine “progresso tecnologico” a quei casi in cui nuovi strumenti ampliano le capacità e l’efficienza di un numero crescente di persone, in particolare quando questi nuovi strumenti permettono di produrre valori d’uso in modo più indipendente.⁷

Una società conviviale è caratterizzata da un accesso equo e da un’ampia distribuzione, non dalla concentrazione, di potere: “La società conviviale riposerà su contratti sociali che garantiscano a ognuno il più ampio e libero accesso agli strumenti della comunità, alla sola condizione di non ledere l’uguale libertà altrui.⁸”

La società industriale, al contrario, parte (erroneamente, come spiegherò più giù) dal presupposto che “per mantenere elevata la produzione serve la disuguaglianza… Le stesse istituzioni politiche funzionano come meccanismi di pressione e di repressione che indirizzano il cittadino e raddrizzano il deviante, per renderli conformi agli obiettivi di produzione. Il Diritto è subordinato al bene dell’istituzione.⁹”

Similmente, Illich distingue il lavoro industriale, o salariato, da quello che definisce “lavoro vernacolare”. Quest’ultimo indica “attività non remunerate che migliorano l’esistenza”, che producono cose “nei beni comuni”, non acquistabili sul mercato; un concetto che risponde, vagamente tutt’al più, ai concetti di “settore informale”, “valore d’uso” e “riproduzione sociale”.¹⁰ Illich spiega che con l’espressione “vernacolare” vuole indicare generalmente attività di “sopravvivenza derivate da forme reciproche in ogni aspetto della vita, diverse dalla sopravvivenza che passa dallo scambio o dalla distribuzione verticale”. Insomma, il bene comune opposto al nesso di cassa e alla gestione burocratica.¹¹

Le due soglie e l’effetto controproducente

Ne La convivialità Illich si serve della storia della medicina per spiegare quelle che definisce le due soglie della tecnologia. La prima soglia, tra la metà dell’Ottocento e i primi del Novecento, è raggiunta quando una serie di tecnologie dà risultati estremamente positivi in relazione ai costi: anestesia, disinfezione, antibiotici e pratiche non mediche come la nutrizione di base, la disinfezione e la derattizzazione. L’effetto è un “crollo verticale della mortalità”.¹²

In questa prima fase le tecnologie mediche hanno alcuni punti in comune: “quando non diventano monopolio di professionisti che li usano come strumenti esclusivi della loro professione, hanno di solito un costo bassissimo e richiedono una quantità minima di materiali, di capacità personali e di servizi ospedalieri.¹³”

Con il superamento della seconda soglia, gli investimenti in nuove tecnologie producono risultati, rispetto ai costi, modesti o minimi o addirittura, al netto, negativi. Un esempio di risultato negativo sono i batteri resistenti agli antibiotici, gli ospedali come luogo in cui si contraggono malattie e l’accanimento terapeutico che allunga la vita di qualche giorno con costi equivalenti ad anni di reddito di una famiglia.¹⁴

Con la seconda soglia, a un’ulteriore professionalizzazione corrisponde un calo dell’utile marginale, almeno in termini di benessere fisico del numero più ampio possibile di persone. Cresce la disutilità marginale: alla crescita del monopolio delle istituzioni mediche corrisponde la crescita della sofferenza della maggioranza delle persone.¹⁵

Oltre questa seconda soglia, strumenti, tecnologie e istituzioni diventano svantaggiosi: “Quando la crescita di un’attività economica va oltre un certo punto, cessa il fine per cui è stata originariamente pensata e diventa una minaccia per la società.¹⁶”

Le nostre principali istituzioni hanno acquisito l’inquietante potere di sovvertire i fini per cui sono state pensate e finanziate. Governati dalle professioni più prestigiose, gli strumenti istituzionali paradossalmente generano soprattutto un effetto controproducente…¹⁷

Secondo Illich, il paradigma va al di là della sanità. “Altre istituzioni sono passate da queste soglie.”

In un primo momento, le conoscenze sono applicate alla soluzione di problemi ben definiti e metri di misurazione illustrano la nuova efficienza. In un secondo momento, il progresso ottenuto in precedenza serve da logica per lo sfruttamento della società nel suo insieme al servizio di un valore determinato e rivisto periodicamente da una parte della società: le élite professionali che si autocertificano.¹⁸

Alla seconda fase si associa tendenzialmente una cultura istituzionale fatta di costi elevati, che crescono drasticamente ad ogni unità prodotta e ai quali si aggiunge un declino produttivo.

Negli ultimi vent’anni, l’indice dei prezzi generale negli Stati Uniti è cresciuto del 74 percento circa, mentre nel solo settore sanitario la crescita è stata del 330 percento. Se la spesa pubblica sanitaria è decuplicata, la spesa viva dell’utenza è triplicata e il costo dell’assicurazione sanitaria è cresciuto diciotto volte. Dal 1950 ad oggi, i costi degli ospedali di comunità sono cresciuti del 500 percento. Nei principali ospedali i costi sono cresciuti ancora più rapidamente, triplicando ogni otto anni. Le spese amministrative sono settuplicate, quelle per i laboratori quintuplicate. Creare un posto in ospedale oggi costa 65.000 dollari, due terzi dei quali costituiti da apparecchiature meccaniche ammortizzate o rese obsolete in dieci anni. A questa crescita dei costi corrisponde un calo dell’aspettativa di vita degli americani di sesso maschile.¹⁹

È dimostrabile che con l’espansione oltre una certa soglia della produzione industriale nei settori principali, l’utilità marginale non è più distribuita equamente, ma soprattutto cala l’efficienza generale.²⁰

Un’istituzione che giunge alla seconda soglia “tende a manipolare fortemente la realtà”. Ovvero, “cose pensate per certi fini istituzionali vengono sempre più spesso ridefinite in modo da impedirne l’utilizzo autonomo.²¹”

Lo sviluppo degli strumenti segue due strade. Con la prima, la macchina amplia le capacità dell’uomo, mentre con la seconda riduce, elimina o sostituisce le sue funzioni. Nel primo caso, l’uomo come individuo può esercitare la propria autorità su se stesso e assumere la conseguente responsabilità. Nel secondo caso, è la macchina che ha il sopravvento, in primo luogo riducendo la scelta e il movente sia dell’operatore che del cliente, e in secondo luogo imponendo ad entrambi la propria logica e i propri bisogni.²²

Nelle sezioni seguenti affronterò il tema del monopolio radicale e la dipendenza dalle istituzioni.

Il monopolio radicale

Si ha monopolio tradizionale, microeconomico, quando una ditta si assicura una posizione dominante nella fornitura di un particolare bene nel mercato. Si ha monopolio radicale, invece, quando tutto un complesso istituzionale rende artificialmente indispensabili certi beni al fine di giustificare la propria esistenza e tagliare fuori le alternative. Il monopolio radicale impone l’obbligo di consumare e pertanto limita l’autonomia personale. Costituisce un genere particolare di controllo sociale perché si basa sull’imposizione del consumo di un prodotto standard che solo le grandi istituzioni possono offrire.²³”

Tutt’altra cosa è invece quello che io definisco col termine “monopolio radicale”, e che consiste nella sostituzione di un prodotto industriale o di un servizio professionale a una attività utile cui la gente si dedica o vorrebbe dedicarsi.²⁴

Un esempio classico di monopolio radicale è la cultura dell’auto con la conseguente dispersione urbana.

I trasporti, per esempio, possono monopolizzare la circolazione. Le automobili possono modellare una città a loro immagine, eliminando praticamente la locomozione a piedi o in bicicletta, come a Los Angeles. … Che l’automobile riduca il diritto di camminare, questo è monopolio radicale, e non il fatto che si contino più guidatori di Fiat che di Alfa Romeo. … Ma il monopolio radicale stabilito dal veicolo a motore ha un modo tutto suo di distruggere. Le automobili creano distanze. … Si incuneano autostrade attraverso regioni sovrappopolate, e poi si estorce alla gente un pedaggio per “autorizzarla” a superare le distanze che il sistema del trasporto esige di per sé. Questo monopolio dei trasporti, come una bestia mostruosa, divora lo spazio.²⁵

… Il monopolio radicale paralizza l’agire indipendente a favore di un prodotto fatto da professionisti. Più le auto prendono il posto delle persone e più occorrono dirigenti del traffico e più la gente diventa incapace di tornare a casa a piedi.²⁶

Un altro esempio lo vediamo nel modo in cui tutto quel complesso istituzionale che ruota attorno all’industria delle costruzioni (ditte d’appalto, produttori di materiali, norme costruttive e così via) ha rafforzato il proprio potere a discapito delle alternative conviviali. Appena fuori dalle città del sud del mondo vediamo favelas e baraccopoli, che spesso mostrano un alto grado di capacità manuali e tecniche (Colin Ward parla estensivamente della tradizionale autocostruzione delle case anche in occidente).²⁷ È tecnicamente possibile produrre materiali da costruzione per farsi la casa da sé. “Le parti che compongono una casa o un servizio pubblico possono essere prodotte a costo bassissimo e pensate per il montaggio faidatè.²⁸” Le normative non solo vietano queste tecniche col pretesto della sicurezza, ma vietano anche, imponendo tecnologie convenzionali per legge, alle imprese di far concorrenza con tecniche costruttive tradizionali, a basso costo, servendosi di materiali locali.

Il problema del monopolio radicale è esasperato da una cultura istituzionale comune che non vede altra soluzione agli effetti negativi del monopolio radicale se non la crescita in dimensioni del monopolio stesso. Le élite manageriali di un certo settore che soffre delle patologie del monopolio radicale sono perlopiù portati a considerare “estremistica” qualunque proposta che non sia applicata all’interno dell’attuale quadro istituzionale da persone come loro stessi. Questo significa che “l’istituzione è giunta a definire il fine”.²⁹ Quando il male è la cattiva gestione burocratica manageriale, l’unica cura ammessa è: più risorse e più controllo. L’approccio standard di una burocrazia manageriale consiste nel “risolvere la crisi con l’escalation”.³⁰ Le riforme fatte all’interno del quadro di riferimento del monopolio radicale “inaspriscono ciò che si suppone debbano eliminare”.³¹

La cultura manageriale e burocratica propria delle istituzioni del monopolio radicale, con la sua tendenza agli alti costi generali e allo spreco, esaspera il calo dell’efficienza nei costi associata alla seconda soglia. Pur facendo una critica della sanità difficile da accettare (al limite dell’eugenetica), molte sue osservazioni sulla cultura istituzionale colgono il segno. La sanità istituzionale è gestita seguendo la stessa regola della massimizzazione dei costi che Seymour Melman notava negli appalti del Pentagono e nei servizi pubblici, quello che Paul Goodman chiamava “il grande dominio del costo-più”.³²

La crescita sbalorditiva dei costi della sanità negli Stati Uniti è stata spiegata in vari modi: è colpa di una pianificazione irrazionale, dice qualcuno, mentre altri puntano il dito sugli alti costi delle belle novità che la gente vuole negli ospedali. La spiegazione più diffusa al momento parla della crescente incidenza del prepagamento dei servizi. Gli ospedali ammettono pazienti assicurati, e invece di offrire servizi esistenti in modo più efficiente e meno costoso, sono economicamente incentivati ad operare con nuovi sistemi sempre più costosi. La crescita dei costi è così imputata al cambiamento di sistema piuttosto che all’alto costo del lavoro, alla cattiva amministrazione o al mancato progresso tecnologico.³³

L’inflazione dei costi è spinta anche dal fatto che i trattamenti medici sono solitamente richiesti da consumatori istituzionali che non pagano di tasca propria e destinati all’utilizzo altrui:

In quanto merci, i farmaci a prescrizione agiscono diversamente da tante altre cose: sono prodotti che il consumatore finale raramente sceglie da sé. Il produttore fa pressione sul “consumatore strumentale”, ovvero il medico che prescrive un prodotto ma non lo paga.³⁴

L’istituzionalizzazione dei valori

Come già abbiamo visto, i complessi istituzionali sono al cuore del monopolio radicale. Illich illustra tutta una gamma di forme istituzionali, da quelle interamente “conviviali” all’estrema sinistra a quelle “manipolatorie” all’estrema destra. E le mette a confronto così:

Non occorrono particolari metodi di vendita, più o meno aggressivi, per convincere i clienti a servirsi dei telefoni, delle linee metropolitane, della posta, dei mercati pubblici e della borsa. E anche le fogne, l’acqua potabile, i parchi e i marciapiedi sono istituzioni di cui gli uomini si servono senza che sia necessario convincerli con strumenti istituzionali che ciò è nel loro interesse. …

Le istituzioni di destra sono in genere processi di produzione assai complessi e costosi, nei quali gran parte dell’elaborazione e dei costi serve a convincere i consumatori che non si può vivere senza il prodotto o il trattamento offerti da quella data istituzione. Le istituzioni di sinistra sono invece di solito delle reti per facilitare una comunicazione o una cooperazione nate dall’iniziativa dei clienti.³⁵

Uno degli effetti collaterali del monopolio radicale è che all’individuo un tempo autonomo e autodiretto viene insegnato a vedere se stesso come consumatore di beni prodotti da certi complessi istituzionali, nonché come cliente dei burocrati professionisti che gestiscono tali complessi. Quella società che un tempo rappresentava lo sforzo comune delle persone viene ricondotta al controllo da parte delle istituzioni e delle loro burocrazie manageriali.

Nella sua prima opera importante, Descolarizzare la società, Illich parla della scuola istituzionale come caso di studio in fatto di dipendenza dalle istituzioni; come rimarcherà poi ne La convivialità, “L’analisi dell’apparato educativo di ogni società fondata sull’espansione del modo di produzione industriale mi ha aperto la strada alla scoperta dei limiti non-ecologici di questa espansione. Lo sviluppo del sistema scolastico obbligatorio mi è parso infatti l’esempio-tipo di una situazione che si ritrova anche in altri ambiti della società industriale…³⁶”

Allo studente si insegna che “tutto ciò che una grande istituzione produce ha valore.³⁷” Le istituzioni producono valore. La scuola diventa così il primo passo verso la “confusione tra processo e sostanza”.

Salute, apprendimento, dignità, indipendenza e, creatività si identificano, o quasi, con la prestazione delle istituzioni che si dicono al servizio di questi fini, e si fa credere che per migliorare la salute, l’apprendimento ecc. sia sufficiente stanziare somme maggiori per la gestione degli ospedali, delle scuole e degli altri enti in questione.³⁸

In sintesi, l’equivalenza tra valore e processo istituzionale porta a vedere nel processo produttivo di un’istituzione un sostituto del processo produttivo di beni e servizi utili.

La prima cosa che si insegna ad uno studente è che produrre o consumare autonomamente, fuori dalle istituzioni e senza il loro controllo, è un atto sovversivo. Lo studente apprende così che

il curarsi da soli sia segno d’irresponsabilità, che lo studiare da soli non dia sicurezza e che qualunque iniziativa comunitaria, se non è pagata dalle autorità competenti, sia una forma di aggressione o di sovversione. Essendo condizionati dalle istituzioni, entrambi i gruppi guardano con sospetto a ciò che si realizza indipendentemente da esse.³⁹

In seguito, entrando nel mondo adulto, lo studente impara che il “lavoro” non è ciò che uno fa ma ciò che gli viene dato dalle istituzioni.⁴⁰

Ciò che conta in una società ad alta intensità di mercato non è lo sforzo rivolto a produrre qualcosa che piaccia, o il piacere che deriva da tale sforzo, ma l’accoppiamento della forza lavoro col capitale. Ciò che conta non è il conseguimento della soddisfazione che procura l’agire, ma la collocazione nel rapporto sociale che presiede alla produzione, cioè l’impiego, il posto, la carica… Il lavoro non è produttivo, rispettabile, degno di un cittadino se non quando è programmato, diretto e controllato da un rappresentante delle professioni, il quale garantisca che risponde in forma standardizzata a un bisogno riconosciuto. In una società industriale avanzata diventa quasi impossibile cercare o anche soltanto immaginare di fare a meno di un impiego per dedicarsi a un lavoro autonomo e utile.

L’infrastruttura della società è combinata in maniera tale che solo l’impiego dà accesso agli strumenti di produzione…⁴¹

Nel corso di una vita, la scuola rappresenta solitamente la prima di una lunga serie di esperienze con le istituzioni, così che

tutte le nostre attività tendono ad assumere la forma di un rapporto clientelare con altre istituzioni specializzate. Una volta screditato l’autodidatta, ogni attività non professionale diventa sospetta. A scuola ci insegnano che un’istruzione valida è il risultato della frequenza; che il valore dell’apprendimento aumenta proporzionalmente all’input, alla quantità di nozioni immesse e, infine, che questo valore può essere misurato e documentato da voti e diplomi.⁴²

Parallelamente, si tende a sostituire il concetto di azione individuale con quello di servizio istituzionale sotto forma di merce.

L’illusione che i modelli economici possano ignorare i valori d’uso nasce dalla convinzione che quelle attività che noi designiamo con verbi intransitivi si possono sostituire indefinitamente con dei prodotti predisposti da istituzioni e che si indicano con un sostantivo: ‘l’istruzione’ al posto di ‘io apprendo’, ‘l’assistenza sanitaria’ per ‘io guarisco’, ‘i trasporti’ per ‘io mi muovo’, ‘la televisione’ per ‘io mi diverto’.⁴³

La funzione principale di tutte queste istituzioni, che sono nate o hanno raggiunto le dimensioni attuali con l’ascesa del capitale monopolistico, è di fare da supporto al capitale monopolistico stesso, ovvero organizzare la società attorno ai bisogni dell’industria di produzione di massa. La loro funzione più importante consiste nel processare gli input umani al sistema industriale e gestirne i sottoprodotti di scarto (con le carceri e con i sussidi per i lavoratori in eccesso), consumare in eccesso o generare una domanda che assorba la produzione industriale. “Per Marx il costo di produzione della richiesta di merci aveva un’importanza trascurabile. Oggi la maggior parte della manodopera umana è impegnata nel produrre richieste che possano essere soddisfatte da un’industria a forte intensità di capitale. La massima parte di questo lavoro viene fatto nella scuola.⁴⁴”

I servizi professionali offerti da tali istituzioni, pur essendo considerati dalla moderna mentalità capitalista un esempio di progresso materiale, hanno come effetto reale la produzione di una sorta di dipendenza e di povertà ad alto costo. Impoveriscono l’individuo impedendogli di utilizzare le proprie capacità e i propri legami sociali, cioè il proprio capitale umano, per soddisfare i propri bisogni senza l’intermediazione di una burocrazia delle professioni.

L’incapacità, peculiarmente moderna, di usare in modo autonomo le doti personali, la vita comunitaria e le risorse ambientali infetta ogni aspetto della vita in cui una merce escogitata da professionisti sia riuscita a soppiantare un valore d’uso plasmato da una cultura. Viene così soppressa la possibilità di conoscere una soddisfazione personale e sociale al di fuori del mercato. Io sono povero, per esempio, una volta che per il fatto di abitare a Los Angeles o di lavorare al trentacinquesimo piano abbia perduto il valore d’uso delle mie gambe.⁴⁵

A questo proposito, la dipendenza dalle istituzioni (”povertà modernizzata” o “impotenza istituzionale”) mostra la sua indissolubile relazione con il monopolio radicale, ottenuta tagliando fuori le alternative. All’individuo viene impedito di fare a meno dei beni e prodotti dai complessi istituzionali. “Dove regna questo tipo di povertà, è impedito o criminalizzato qualsiasi modo di vivere che non dipenda da un consumo di merci. Fare a meno di consumare diventa impossibile, non soltanto per il consumatore medio ma persino per il povero.” Una parte sempre più grande dei beni che consumiamo è organizzata “come una merce anziché un’attività.” “Che poi questa merce sia fornita da un imprenditore privato o da un apparatčik, il risultato concreto è sempre lo stesso: l’impotenza del cittadino, la nostra forma, specificatamente moderna, di povertà.⁴⁶”

Questo professionalismo tecnocratico associato al monopolio radicale (le “professioni disabilitanti”) è altra cosa rispetto ai vecchi mestieri specializzati o le vecchie libere professioni in virtù dell’autorità che lo accompagna.

I becchini per esempio, negli Stati Uniti, hanno posto in essere una professione non perché ora si chiamino impresari di pompe funebri, o perché è richiesto un diploma per esercitare la loro attività, o perché le loro prestazioni sono diventate molto care, e neppure perché si sono sbarazzati dell’odore appiccicato al loro mestiere facendo eleggere uno di loro presidente del Lion’s Club: costituiscono una professione, dominante e menomante, dal momento in cui hanno acquistato il potere di far bloccare dalla polizia un funerale se il morto non è stato imbalsamato e chiuso nella bara da loro.⁴⁷

Sparisce la comunità, sostituita da una nuova placenta composta di tubi che erogano assistenza professionale.⁴⁸

Quest’ultimo punto è fondamentale. Le professioni dell’assistenza e le istituzioni manageriali, che considerano la persona con cui hanno a che fare principalmente come oggetto della loro autorità piuttosto che come cliente, hanno costretto all’estinzione il bene comune autogestito, il settore sociale e gli altri organismi sociali autonomi.

L’Età delle Professioni sarà ricordata come il tempo in cui la politica è andata in declino, con gli elettori che, guidati dai professori, hanno ceduto ai tecnocrati il potere di codificare in legge i loro bisogni, rinunciando così al potere di decidere chi ha bisogno di che cosa, e lasciando che le oligarchie determinino con quali mezzi devono essere soddisfatti questi bisogni.⁴⁹

Nonostante le tante stranezze nell’analizzare la sanità, Illich ha pienamente ragione quando dice che le istituzioni che curano i vecchi e i malati cronici o i disabili hanno eliminato la possibilità di curarsi a casa o presso l’ambiente sociale rinunciando a servirsi di loro o dar loro un senso.

Quanto più la vecchiaia diventa soggetta a servizi d’assistenza professionale, tanta più gente viene spinta in istituti specializzati per gli anziani, mentre l’ambiente di casa, per quelli che resistono, si fa sempre più inospitale. Questi istituti sembrano il dispositivo strategico odierno per disfarsi dei vecchi, che la maggior parte delle altre società ha tolto di mezzo in forme più schiette e, si potrebbe sostenere, meno odiose.

 Il tasso di mortalità durante il primo anno dopo il ricovero è sensibilmente più alto di quello che si registra fra i vecchi che rimangono nel loro ambiente abituale. Il distacco dalla casa contribuisce a far insorgere e a rendere mortali parecchie malattie gravi.⁵⁰

Con la sua critica del monopolio radicale e della dipendenza dalle istituzioni, Illich offre un’analisi acuta dell’ideologia meritocratica. “Una crescita della mobilità sociale può rendere la società più umana, ma solo se allo stesso tempo si assottiglia la differenza in termini di potere che divide i molti dai pochi.⁵¹” La rapidità con cui l’individuo può muoversi tra le gerarchie di potere non importa se la struttura del potere è iniqua. Ciò che conta è lo spaccato del potere in un dato momento, e se i benefici di chi sta in alto vengono a scapito di chi sta in basso.

Critiche

Incomprensioni sulla natura della seconda soglia. Se vogliamo capire dov’è l’errore di Illich quando illustra le due soglie e il monopolio radicale basta semplicemente analizzare il linguaggio usato ne La convivialità: “dobbiamo imporre … limiti alla crescita industriale”; “imporre limiti superiori alla produttività”[!]; “limitare il potere degli strumenti dell’uomo quando questi cominciano a sopraffare l’uomo e i suoi obiettivi”; “strumenti coscientemente limitati”; “dobbiamo difendere collettivamente la nostra esistenza e il nostro operare contro gli strumenti e le istituzioni che minacciano o misconoscono il diritto delle persone a utilizzare creativamente le proprie energie”; “È in sede politica che bisognerà fissare i limiti del modo di produzione industriale”; “limiti auspicabili alla specializzazione e alla produzione”; “limitare politicamente quegli strumenti che limitano la libertà di usarli autonomamente a pochissime persone;” “i mezzi di trasporto supersonici dovrebbero essere banditi”; “riduzione volontaria della sovraefficienza”; “limiti agli strumenti”; “un limite alla velocità dei veicoli”; “imporre limiti ai loro strumenti a beneficio della convivialità”.

In sostanza, Illich fraintende le cause della “crescita”. Nel suo modo d’intendere la tecnologia, gli “strumenti sovraefficienti”, semplicemente in virtù della loro esistenza, portano con sé un imperativo totalizzante con cui si espandono rifacendo la società a propria immagine, a meno che non vengano limitati esternamente con la forza.

Se il modo di produzione industriale si espande al di là di una certa fase e continua a urtarsi col modo autonomo, la sofferenza personale aumenta e comincia la dissoluzione sociale. Nell’intervallo (fra il punto di sinergia ottimale tra produzione industriale e produzione autonoma, e il punto di massima egemonia industriale tollerabile) diventano necessarie le procedure politiche e giuridiche per far regredire l’espansione industriale.⁵²

Questo fraintendimento lo porta a scrivere assurdità sulla seconda soglia e sulle esternalità negative:

Ma la maggior parte delle esternalità non si può quantificare e scaricare all’interno: se il prezzo della benzina venisse aumentato in modo da ridurre l’impoverimento delle riserve petrolifere e dell’ossigeno atmosferico, ogni chilometro/passeggero diverrebbe più costoso e avrebbe ancora di più un carattere di privilegio; diminuirebbe il danno ambientale ma aumenterebbe l’ingiustizia sociale. Al di là di un certo grado d’intensità della produzione industriale, le esternalità non si possono ridurre ma solo spostare.⁵³

Contrariamente a ciò che sostiene Illich, se tutti quelli che godono dei vantaggi di una tecnologia fossero costretti ad accollarsene il costo pieno, invece di esternalizzarlo sulla società, smetterebbero non appena i costi dovessero superare i benefici. L’uso di certe tecnologie non si estenderebbe a tutta la società al punto che anche i non privilegiati sono costretti ad usarle pur ritenendole dannose. Se non ci fossero autostrade e se le città non fossero fatte su misura per l’automobile, l’auto sarebbe un semplice trastullo dei ricchi; in versione economica e semplificata sarebbe diventato uno strumento utile per certe nicchie di mercato, come l’agricoltura, le comunità isolate, l’uso promiscuo, come avveniva prima che si diffondesse la cultura dell’auto.

Secondo Illich, gli strumenti e le tecnologie precedono le strutture di potere: le ultime inevitabilmente hanno origine dalle prime.

In realtà, accade esattamente l’opposto. In assenza di limiti imposti, la tecnologia non si riproduce spontaneamente come i conigli fino a sfornare burocrazie autoritarie. Piuttosto le tecnologie vengono imposte perché rispondono ai bisogni delle strutture di potere. Una tecnologia, un’industria, un’istituzione possono andare oltre la seconda soglia ed entrare nel campo dei rientri negativi solo perché le strutture istituzionali di potere possono fare propri i benefici esternalizzando gli effetti negativi sulla massa, verso la quale non hanno responsabilità.

“Superato il limite,” dice Illich, lo strumento da servitore diventa despota.”

 Oltrepassata la soglia, la società diventa scuola, ospedale, prigione, e comincia la grande reclusione. Occorre individuare esattamente dove si trova, per ogni componente dell’equilibrio globale, questo limite critico. Sarà allora possibile articolare in modo nuovo la millenaria triade dell’uomo, dello strumento e della società.⁵⁴

Questo è vero. Ma questi limiti non devono essere imposti dall’esterno contro tecnologie la cui natura (l’“eccesso di efficienza”) altrimenti le farebbe crescere illimitatamente. I limiti devono essere imposti da chi sperimenta sulla sua pelle sia i benefici che le conseguenze negative degli strumenti adottati; l’autorità dovrebbe averla chi subisce gli effetti delle politiche istituzionali e fa il proprio dovere, non un qualche incomprensibile potere gerarchico che serva gli interessi propri o quelli di qualche rentier assenteista.

Illich fa poi un’analisi insufficiente delle cause reali dei rientri negativi che si hanno quando si supera la seconda soglia. Il costo di una tecnologia supera i benefici a causa delle caratteristiche inerenti la tecnologia stessa, o a causa dei fattori istituzionali che guidano l’adozione di tale tecnologia? Nel caso delle tecnologie mediche, esiste un costo minimo dato dai costi materiali di produzione; il costo reale è però probabilmente più alto a causa di fattori aggiunti. Certo esiste una soglia oltre la quale l’adozione di una tecnologia costa più dei benefici che dà; ma si tratta di una soglia resa artificialmente bassa per ragioni istituzionali? E può essere innalzata cambiando il quadro istituzionale? Ad esempio, sono fattori come i diritti legali monopolistici (brevetti, software proprietario, licenze, barriere artificiali all’ingresso e così via) che causano un aumento del prezzo dell’assistenza sanitaria, che consiste in gran parte di rendite incorporate? Non è che invece è la politica statale che toglie la possibilità di un uso alternativo, meno costoso, delle stesse tecnologie? In questo caso, sia i rientri negativi oltre la seconda soglia che tutti gli aspetti negativi del monopolio radicale potrebbero essere imputabili al controllo burocratico (opposto ad un controllo democratico comunitario) sull’attuazione del servizio, più che alla natura in sé del servizio stesso.

Prendiamo la cultura dell’auto, ad esempio. Il problema dell’urbanizzazione selvaggia e della dipendenza dall’auto non derivano dall’auto in sé, ma dagli interessi di potere che hanno plasmato la società seguendo i propri fini. Il problema nasce dall’incentivazione della monocultura dell’auto, dalle autostrade fatte su terre espropriate, dal divieto di costruire quartieri a destinazione mista imposto, tra le altre cose, dai piani regolatori.

Prima che si affermasse la cultura dell’auto e la città su misura per l’auto, di norma le città e le cittadine contenevano di tutto, era possibile andare da casa al lavoro o al negozio utilizzando il tram, la bicicletta o i propri piedi. Quando la popolazione cresceva, si ricorreva generalmente all’espansione modulare, ad esempio i sobborghi serviti dalla ferrovia. La crescita selvaggia non esisteva.

Se autorità federali e locali e dal mercato immobiliare non avessero imposto la cultura dell’auto, quest’ultima avrebbe mantenuto una posizione di nicchia in città che avrebbero mantenuto le forme antiche. L’avrebbe acquistata il contadino che vive in campagna, dove la scarsa densità di popolazione non giustifica i trasporti pubblici. L’avrebbe usata per andare e venire in città, magari con un camioncino per portare ortaggi al mercato o per portare a casa la spesa, e avrebbe avuto un piccolo motore a combustione interna o elettrico. Non avremmo visto auto sfrecciare nelle strade extraurbane, niente motori a sei cilindri, solo automezzi leggeri. Per produrre la carrozzeria sarebbe bastato un banco da taglio, niente presse industriali alte come una casa di due o tre piani. Le automobili sarebbero state prodotte localmente in centinaia di fabbriche.

Pertanto non è vero che “oltre una certa soglia di consumo energetico, l’industria dei trasporti detta la configurazione dello spazio sociale.⁵⁵” Piuttosto è la configurazione dello spazio sociale che impone le modalità di trasporto adottate, le quali a loro volta impongono il livello di consumo energetico.

Illich tende a vedere nella diffusione delle burocrazie manageriali, con le loro riluttanti clientele, un fenomeno in espansione di cui non c’è bisogno di indagare le cause, più che un affetto secondario di più ampi interessi di classe e di potere; come vediamo quando parla degli occupanti abusivi.

 Sia i non-modernizzati sia i post-moderni si oppongono al divieto della società all’autodeterminazione spaziale, e dovranno fare i conti con la repressione poliziesca del disturbo che creano. Saranno definiti invasori, occupanti illegali, anarchici e disturbatori, secondo le circostanze in cui affermano la propria libertà di abitare: indios che si installano in un terreno incolto a Lima; “favellados” di Rio de Janeiro che ritornano a occupare la collina da cui sono appena stati cacciati dalla polizia (dopo averla abitata per quarant’anni); studenti che osano trasformare in abitazioni le rovine del Kreuzberg a Berlino; portoricani che con la forza tornano a occupare gli edifici bruciati e murati del South Bronx. Saranno tutti sloggiati, non tanto per il danno che arrecano al proprietario del terreno o perché rappresentino una minaccia per la pace o per la salute dei vicini, ma per la sfida che lanciano all’assioma sociale che definisce il cittadino come unità che ha bisogno di un garage standard. [Corsivo aggiunto]

Sia la tribù di indios che scende dalle Ande per installarsi nei sobborghi di Lima, sia il consiglio di quartiere di Chicago che si dissocia dall’ente cittadino preposto all’edilizia contestano il modello oggi dominante del cittadino come “Homo castrensis”, uomo acquartierato.⁵⁶

Illich commette un grosso errore critico quando spiega tutto ciò parlando di una inerente logica espansionistica, o della spinta ad egemonizzare propria delle “classi managerial-professionali”, non ci vede il risultato di un più ampio e duraturo processo di privatizzazione e appropriazione della terra spinto dagli interessi della classe capitalista.

Incapacità di ammettere possibili alternative industriali. Così come fraintende il concetto di “strumento sovraefficiente” o “maligno”, Illich fraintende anche il concetto di controproducente di cui al capitolo precedente. Parte da questo principio: l’invenzione e la diffusione di “strumenti più efficienti” porta inevitabilmente ad una seconda soglia con conseguente dominio da parte di un’élite manageriale. In realtà, la seconda soglia viene raggiunta solo quando viene imposta da queste élite. L’agire controproducente diventa così l’effetto, non la causa, del dominio delle élite manageriali.

Certi strumenti, però, non vengono adottati illimitatamente perché “più efficienti”, e dunque perché rendono obsoleti strumenti più appropriati grazie alla loro maggiore efficienza. E il problema non è neanche “l’illusione che la potenza della macchina possa sostituire indefinitamente il lavoro dell’uomo”, o il fatto che “elevati quanta di energia degradano le relazioni sociali con la stessa ineluttabilità con cui distruggono l’ambiente fisico.⁵⁷”

Il problema non sono i quanta elevati di energia o la potenza della macchina in sé, ma il fatto che tutto ciò venga adottato senza considerare le dimensioni del flusso produttivo occorrente a soddisfare una certa quantità di domanda. Quanta energetici e potenza della macchina vengono massimizzati a livelli assolutamente sproporzionati al livello produttivo necessario a soddisfare la domanda; così che il costo totale di tutti gli interventi atti a garantire il consumo dell’intera produzione supera il costo dei presunti risparmi dati dalle “economie di scala”. L’industria capitalista ha la possibilità di adottare tecniche produttive a forte intensità di capitale su larga scala perché, nonostante le forti inefficienze, è in grado di esternalizzare i costi delle inefficienze sul consumatore o su chi paga le tasse.

Gli “strumenti controproducenti” vengono adottati solo perché portano benefici a chi decide di adottarli e perché gli effetti negativi possono essere scaricati esternamente. La soluzione non consiste nel “vietare” questi strumenti, ma nel porre il potere di controllo dell’intera organizzazione sociale nelle mani di chi subisce gli effetti delle decisioni.

Contrariamente a ciò che sostiene lo stato corporativo, e cioè che le strutture istituzionali della produzione di massa sono indispensabili a “mantenere alta la produzione”, cosa che Illich prende per buona, tali strutture non massimizzano affatto la produzione, intesa come prodotto consumabile. Piuttosto fa sì che il processo produttivo massimizzi il consumo di fattori produttivi, in risposta all’imperativo di massimizzare l’utilizzo della capacità produttiva, se occorre con lo spreco e le inefficienze. Nel capitalismo della produzione di massa, la stessa nozione di “crescita” (l’aumento del pil) equivale a una crescita del valore totale dei fattori di produzione consumati.

Il concetto di crescita in Illich non è coerente. Decrescita non significa tagliare i consumi o la produzione in sé, ma distruggere la crescita del valore di scambio monetizzato (che misura il totale delle risorse consumate per ottenere un certo livello produttivo). Un approccio appropriato non passa dall’imposizione dell’austerità o di un limite al consumo in sé, ma attraverso la limitazione delle risorse in input, ovvero: bisogna smettere di sovvenzionare il consumo delle risorse, che agli occhi delle imprese capitaliste appaiono artificialmente abbondanti. Il problema della crescita dev’essere affrontato dal lato delle risorse, non del consumo.⁵⁸

Illich vorrebbe “abbassare l’efficienza industriale”.⁵⁹ Ma il problema è che si ricorre deliberatamente all’inefficienza per utilizzare al massimo la capacità produttiva. Gli strumenti della produzione di massa sono “sovraefficienti” solo nel senso che sono troppo efficienti per un flusso produttivo determinato dalla domanda autonoma. In termini di efficienza pura e semplice, l’ideale sarebbe che il processo produttivo avvenisse il più vicino possibile al luogo del consumo e che il flusso produttivo si riducesse al livello della domanda autonoma, con conseguente ridimensionamento dei macchinari. Il capitalismo della produzione di massa al contrario massimizza la produzione delle singole macchine a prescindere dalla domanda, il che porta a rifare la società ad immagine di una macchina di Rube Goldberg, sovvenzionando lo spreco, la distribuzione a lunga distanza e il marketing ad alta intensità al fine di garantire il consumo di tutta la produzione e tenere le macchine al massimo.

Illich considera superflua la “produzione industriale di massa”. Per lui le tecnologie della produzione di massa sono inerenti l’industria in sé, esiste solo una falsa alternativa tra industria di produzione di massa e produzione manuale (anche se fortemente tecnologica grazie al design e ai materiali del ventesimo secolo). Il fatto che ignori le alternative è evidente qui:

Nessun genere di attrezzatura realizzabile in passato poteva rendere possibili un tipo di società e un modo di attività contrassegnati al tempo stesso dall’efficienza e dalla convivialità: non la tecnica tradizionale, in quanto troppo inefficiente, né la tecnica industriale perché è troppo centralizzata. Ma oggi possiamo concepire degli strumenti che permettono di eliminare la schiavitù dell’uomo, senza per questo asservirlo alla macchina. Condizione di questo progresso è il rovesciamento del quadro di istituzioni che governa l’applicazione alla tecnica dei risultati ottenuti dalla scienza. Oggigiorno l’avanzamento scientifico viene identificato con la sostituzione di strumenti programmati all’iniziativa umana; ma ciò che in tal modo si scambia per l’effetto della logica che si crede di aver scoperto nelle cose non è in realtà che la conseguenza di un pregiudizio ideologico. La struttura dello strumento deciderà se l’uomo si avvia verso un nuovo, moderno livello di artigianato, o verso un mondo di funzionariato universale.⁶⁰

Altrove attribuisce all’industria i mali della produzione di massa: “Non si può migliorare il prodotto senza riconvertire grossi macchinari, nel senso tecnico che i tecnici danno a questa parola. Per far fruttare ciò, occorre creare mercati enormi su misura per questo modello.⁶¹”

Scusabile dato che, in quanto figlio del suo tempo, non conosceva il potenziale della produzione industriale alternativa di piccola scala. Ma non era questa mancanza di alternative a limitare la scelta tra produzione industriale di massa e produzione artigianale. I suoi testi abbondano di riferimenti che dimostrano la conoscenza di possibilità alternative, per cui un’assoluzione per ignoranza non è possibile.

È significativo che ne La Convivialità Illich citi estesamente The Pentagon of Power di Lewis Mumford,⁶² un libro che in materia di tecnologia accentua il pessimismo dei suoi primi scritti, un libro in linea con Jacques Ellul nel vedere nella tecnologia industriale una forza inerentemente totalitaria. Sembra assai improbabile che Illich non conoscesse la più ottimistica Technics and Civilization, opera precedente in cui Mumford parla del potenziale decentralizzante delle tecnologie produttive “neotecniche” basate sulle macchine elettriche.

Ma questo rifiuto delle possibilità alternative non si limita a un’ignoranza selettiva delle opere di Mumford. In un’opera del 1977, non solo dimostra indirettamente di essere a conoscenza di tutta una serie di scritti del tempo sui modelli economici decentrati e a dimensione umana, ma sembra far riferimento al gruppo Radical Technology quando scrive:

Nella nostra epoca non sono certo rare le teorie imperniate sul valore d’uso e capaci di analizzare i costi sociali generati dalle economie ortodosse. Le propongono dozzine di “outsiders”, che le identificano spesso con la tecnologia radicale, con l’ecologia, con i modi di vita comunitari, con la piccola dimensione, con la bellezza.⁶³

Se Illich avesse letto Technics and Civilization, come sicuramente fece, avrebbe saputo che sia la produzione di massa ad alta intensità di capitale che la produzione con macchine di piccola scala hanno un origine comune nelle macchine elettriche introdotte durante la Seconda Rivoluzione Industriale. I sostenitori del decentramento industriale, Pëtr Kropotkin e Ralph Borsodi, e anche Mumford, pensavano che una produzione in piccole officine con macchinari elettrici fosse più in sintonia con lo spirito affrancatore dell’energia elettrica. Se si preferiva la produzione di massa non era perché più efficiente in sé, ma perché più efficiente nel servire gli interessi del nesso stato-capitale.

Per realizzare gli standard della convivialità di Illich, l’ideale potrebbe essere un’organizzazione dell’industria completamente diversa: un modello produttivo artigianale decentrato del tipo proposto da Kropotkin e altri, con macchinari multiuso dislocati in piccole officine nei quartieri o nei piccoli centri, in grado di passare facilmente dalla produzione di serie alla produzione del pezzo singolo. A differenza della produzione di massa, questo modello produttivo non comporta un controllo sociale totalizzante perché si basa su macchine multiuso; inoltre si adatta rapidamente a produzioni diverse e pone al centro l’artigiano; allo stesso tempo, produce solo su domanda, dunque non impone la riformulazione della società in funzione del prodotto.⁶⁴

Quello che Illich sembra non capire è che molti di questi modelli sono industriali, e che già allora la crescita tecnologica, con l’integrazione di mini computer in macchine multiuso, stava rendendo possibile la produzione industriale decentrata e il recupero delle capacità artigianali del lavoratore industriale.

D’altro canto, Illich non distingue conviviale e industriale sulla base del “livello tecnologico dello strumento”: ad esempio, il telefono, che lui considera strumento conviviale, è “il risultato di una tecnologia avanzata”.⁶⁵ Caratteristica distintiva della tecnologia conviviale non è il fatto di essere “alta” o “bassa”, ma la relazione funzionale dello strumento con l’uomo e con l’intera società. Illich lo dice ma non arriva alla logica conclusione:

Il monopolio professionale che si estende sulla nuova tecnologia non è affatto inevitabile. Le grandi invenzioni dell’ultimo secolo, quali i nuovi metalli, i cuscinetti a sfera, certi materiali da costruzione, l’elettronica, certi procedimenti di analisi e certi medicamenti, sono suscettibili di accrescere il potere di entrambi i modi di produzione, di quello eteronomo come di quello autonomo…

La medesima soggezione a tale idea del progresso fa sì che la progettazione sia intesa soprattutto come un contributo all’efficienza delle istituzioni. Alla ricerca scientifica si destinano abbondanti finanziamenti, ma solo se può essere applicata a scopi militari o se serve a consolidare il dominio professionale. Le leghe metalliche che permettono di fabbricare biciclette più robuste e leggere sono un frutto indiretto di studi orientati alla produzione di aviogetti più veloci e di armi più micidiali. Ma i risultati della ricerca si riversano quasi esclusivamente sull’attrezzatura industriale, sicché macchine già enormi diventano ancora più complesse e imperscrutabili per il profano.⁶⁶

Ma poi fraintende: identifica l’industria con la produzione di massa e ad alta intensità di capitale (le “macchine enormi”). Ammette forme di produzione industriale con macchine ad energia non umana, ma solo quando servono a produrre versioni più sofisticate di strumenti ad energia umana.

E non è l’unica volta che Illich in materia di tecnologia si avvicina alla verità per poi allontanarsene. A proposito dell’istruzione, scrive:

Un mito contemporaneo vorrebbe farci credere che la sensazione di impotenza oggi avvertita dalla maggioranza della gente sia l’effetto di una tecnologia che non può fare a meno di creare sistemi giganteschi. Ma non è la tecnologia a rendere giganteschi i sistemi, immensamente potenti gli strumenti, unidirezionali i canali di comunicazione: al contrario, se adeguatamente controllata, la tecnologia potrebbe fornire a tutti la capacità di comprendere meglio il proprio ambiente e di plasmarlo con le proprie mani, e consentirebbe a ciascuno una pienezza di intercomunicazione quale non è mai stata possibile prima d’ora. Questo uso alternativo della tecnologia è anche l’alternativa centrale nel campo dell’istruzione.⁶⁷

Più volte, dopo aver intuito il problema sbaglia la diagnosi. Inizia invocando

un radicale ridimensionamento della struttura professionale che oggi ostacola il rapporto tra il ricercatore e la maggioranza della gente che vuole accedere alla scienza. Se si prestasse ascolto a questa richiesta, tutti gli uomini potrebbero imparare a usare gli strumenti di ieri, resi più efficaci e durevoli dalla scienza d’oggi, per creare il mondo di domani. Purtroppo, quella che prevale oggi è la tendenza esattamente opposta. Conosco una zona costiera dell’America meridionale dove la maggior parte della popolazione si guadagna da vivere praticando la pesca su piccole barche.

Il motore fuoribordo è senza dubbio lo strumento che ha cambiato nel modo più drastico la vita di questi pescatori. Ma nella zona da me studiata, il cinquanta per cento dei fuoribordo acquistati tra il 1945 e il 1950 funziona ancora grazie a continui aggiusti, mentre il cinquanta per cento dei fuori bordo acquistati nel 1965 non va più perché questi ultimi sono stati fabbricati in modo da non poter essere riparati. Il progresso tecnologico fornisce alla maggioranza congegni che essa non può permettersi, mentre la priva degli strumenti più semplici di cui ha bisogno. Il cemento armato, i metalli e le materie plastiche che si usano nell’edilizia hanno fatto grandi progressi dagli anni ’40 e dovrebbero offrire a un maggior numero di persone la possibilità di costruirsi la propria casa. Ma mentre nel 1948 più del 30 per cento delle case unifamiliari degli Stati Uniti erano state fabbricate dal loro proprietario, alla fine degli anni ’60 la percentuale dei costruttori in proprio era scesa a meno del 20 per cento.⁶⁸

“[S]trumenti di ieri, resi più efficaci e durevoli dalla scienza d’oggi” descrive alla perfezione gli strumenti ad alta tecnologia usati nel modello produttivo emiliano basato su piccole attività connesse in rete tra loro,⁶⁹ o il sistema modulare ecologico a macchine open-source, gli strumenti agricoli e edili e così via del Global Village Construction Set all’interno del programma dimostrativo Open Source Ecology’s Factor-e Farm.⁷⁰ Modelli che Illich non esiterebbe a liquidare come “industriali” (come infatti sono), ma che sono anche un esempio di quel “progresso tecnologico” vantato da lui come fornitore di strumenti di liberazione. E rappresentano anche una sintesi di quei modelli ante-fabbrica dotati di tecnologie avanzate, come quelli descritti da Illich stesso. Tutti modelli produttivi che, grazie all’assenza degli imperativi che spingono la produzione di massa a tenere sempre in moto i costosi beni strumentali, non darebbero come risultato prodotti che non possono essere riparati condannati dall’obsolescenza programmata.

Sempre in materia di istruzione, arriviamo ad una seconda fondamentale caratteristica che ogni società postindustriale deve avere: un insieme di strumenti che per loro natura si oppongono al controllo tecnocratico. Dobbiamo cercare di arrivare a una società in cui la conoscenza scientifica viene incorporata in strumenti e componenti utilizzabili in unità abbastanza piccole da essere alla portata di tutti. Solo strumenti simili possono socializzare l’accesso alle competenze. Solo strumenti come questi permettono la collaborazione temporanea tra persone che vogliono servirsi di tali strumenti in casi specifici. Solo questi strumenti permettono ad un particolare obiettivo di emergere con l’uso costante, come sanno gli sperimentatori.⁷¹

Cose ottenibili integrando il computer in strumenti di lavoro ad uso promiscuo in piccole officine di quartiere. Si tratta di strumenti ideali per la produzione artigianale in officine indipendenti, o per la produzione amatoriale specializzata finalizzata all’uso nel settore sociale o casalingo (come gli hackerspace o le officine che offrono strumenti condivisi).

Contrariamente a ciò che pensa Illich, per arrivarci non servono macchine più piccole e meno efficienti. Basta invertire l’ordine: partire dai fini per arrivare agli strumenti. La produzione di massa prende come dati di fatto la centralizzazione e le dimensioni delle macchine, subordina il fine ai mezzi e plasma il consumo per adattarlo alla produzione di massa. Al contrario, noi dobbiamo partire dalla domanda, adattare il flusso produttivo a questa domanda e determinare le dimensioni e l’efficienza che più si adattano a quel determinato flusso produttivo. Non serve imporre limiti agli strumenti per favorire il ritorno ad un’economia locale e autonoma; prima si torna ad un’economia locale e autonoma e poi si scelgono gli strumenti più adatti. Il problema dell’energia e degli strumenti produttivi si risolve da sé.

Tendenze tradizionalistiche e reazionarie. Uno degli aspetti più inquietanti del pensiero di Illich è la sua apperente tendenza verso quella sorta di essenzialismo di genere, verso certe tendenze eugenetiche proprie di ideologie come il primitivismo e il conservatorismo tradizionalista dei “conservatori sociali”.

Ne La Convivialità si rammarica del fatto che “[i]l rafforzamento dei meccanismi di usura (obsolescenza) minaccia il diritto dell’uomo alla propria tradizione, il suo ricorso al precedente attraverso il linguaggio, il mito, il rituale e, anzi tutto, il Diritto.⁷²” Termini come “tradizione” e “precedente attraverso… il rituale” sono abbastanza generici da permettere un’ampia interpretazione. Ma sempre nello stesso libro, nel riconoscere la dignità del lavoro domestico sembra andare oltre il pensiero di Silvia Federici quando apparentemente allude ad una sorta di divisione del lavoro basato sui generi sulla base di una visione complementare del binarismo di genere.

L’espansione dell’industria si arresterebbe se le donne ci forzassero a riconoscere che la società non è più vitale quando un solo modo di produzione eserciti il suo dominio sull’insieme. E urgente prendere coscienza della pluralità dei modi di produzione, ciascuno valido e rispettabile, che una società, per essere vitale, deve far coesistere. Questa presa di coscienza ci renderebbe padroni della crescita industriale. La crescita si arresterebbe se le donne e le altre minoranze tenute lontane dal potere esigessero un lavoro egualmente creativo per tutti, anziché reclamare l’eguaglianza dei diritti sulla mega-attrezzatura manipolata fino ad oggi dall’uomo soltanto. Solo una struttura di produzione che protegga l’eguale ripartizione del potere permette un eguale godimento dell’avere.⁷³

A tratti il pensiero di Illich appare condivisibile, o quasi, come quando paragona i ruoli di genere della donna nell’economia di sussistenza con i lavori domestici in una società industriale capitalista. Nel 1810…

Le donne avevano parte attiva non meno degli uomini nella creazione dell’autosufficienza familiare. E quando si trattava di “lavoro”, non di rado portavano a casa quanto gli uomini. … situazione che mutò nel 1830… Nel corso di una generazione, la donna da conduttrice di un’azienda divenne custode di un’abitazione dove i bambini erano ospitati prima di cominciare a lavorare, dove il marito riposava e dove si spendevano i suoi guadagni: se non realtà, questo divenne l’ideale.⁷⁴

[O]vunque il lavoro salariato si espande, cresce anche la sua ombra, la schiavitù industriale. Il lavoro salariato quale forma dominante di produzione e il lavoro domestico, sessualmente specifico, quale tipo ideale di prestazione non remunerata, sono, l’uno e l’altro, forme di attività che nella storia umana non hanno precedenti.⁷⁵ “…Improvvisamente, nell’Ottocento, i ruoli divisi per sesso nelle attività domestiche furono sostituiti dalla divisione economica tra lavoro salariato e lavoro ombra…⁷⁶”

Anche qui, però, un’analisi apparentemente condivisibile sfuma inevitabilmente in una visione dei generi prettamente complementare:

Una società industriale per esistere deve imporre certi assunti unisex: il concetto per cui i due sessi sono fatti per lo stesso lavoro, percepiscono la stessa realtà e hanno, con alcune piccole differenze apparenti, gli stessi bisogni.⁷⁷

Quella che per Illich è una divisione del lavoro naturale, non sessista, è possibile solo in un’economia in cui l’unità produttiva è la famiglia. Sotto il dominio del nesso di cassa e del lavoro salariato, l’attività domestica della donna inevitabilmente si svilisce davanti alla “vera” (che produce valore di scambio) attività dell’uomo, e l’attività riproduttiva della donna viene sussunta in qualità di funzione ausiliaria che esiste solo come puntello dell’attività salariata maschile.

E le donne che partecipano al sistema salariale, nonostante tutti i tentativi di riforma, continuano a soffrire la discriminazione sessista.⁷⁸

In realtà Illich idealizza una presunta cultura precapitalista priva di sessismi tanto da ricordare chi favoleggia lo stile di vita degli schiavi paragonato a quello dei lavoratori salariati: “La discriminazione economica della donna non esisterebbe senza l’eliminazione delle differenze sessuali e il costrutto sociale dei sessi.⁷⁹” Secondo lui, il problema del sessismo che inevitabilmente accompagna le innaturali condizioni di vita sotto il capitalismo (“la crescita economica che intrinsecamente e innaturalmente distrugge la differenza tra i sessi, ovvero è sessista”)⁸⁰ può essere eliminato solo tornando ad una visione complementare della divisione sessuale dei compiti. “…Condizione necessaria, anche se insufficiente, per l’eliminazione del sessismo è la limitazione del nesso di cassa e l’allargamento delle forme di sussistenza extra-mercato, non economiche.⁸¹”

Illich ricorre a tutta una serie di analogie per illustrare i ruoli di genere in una società in cui la sussistenza non dipende dal salario. “Quelli che noi vediamo come uomini e donne possono incontrarsi e adattarsi reciprocamente non a causa, ma nonostante i contrasti. Si adattano come la destra si adatta alla sinistra.” E prosegue paragonando la relazione tra i ruoli dei due sessi nelle diverse culture alle relazioni attribuite alle due mani nelle diverse culture o allo yin e lo yang.⁸²

Fuori dalle società industriali, il lavoro adatto ad entrambi i sessi è, se non inesistente, una rarità. Sono poche le cose che possono essere fatte indifferentemente dall’uomo e dalla donna. I primi, di norma, non possono fare quello che fanno le donne.⁸³

[La separazione tra i sessi] indica una polarità sociale di fondo e diversa da luogo a luogo. Ciò che l’uomo non può o che deve fare varia da una vallata all’altra.⁸⁴

Non si possono separare gli strumenti dalle relazioni sociali. Ognuno è in relazione con la società tramite i suoi atti e gli strumenti con cui realizza quegli atti. Lo strumento determina l’immagine di chi lo maneggia. In tutte le società preindustriali, ad un insieme di compiti specifici di un determinato sesso corrispondeva un insieme specifico di strumenti. Anche gli strumenti di uso comune possono essere toccati soltanto da una metà della popolazione… Due set di strumenti determinano la complementarità materiale dell’esistenza.⁸⁵

In quest’ultimo paragrafo vediamo come Illich riduce i tradizionali ruoli di genere delle società precapitaliste fino a farne una caricatura. Come dire che l’uomo ha un blocco psichico che quasi gli impedisce, anche in casi eccezionali, di svolgere “attività femminili”, e viceversa. Sembra quasi stregato, come Margaret Mead con le donne di Samoa.

Quando da piccoli percepiscono il mondo da punti di vista complementari, l’uomo e la donna cominciano a concettualizzare l’universo in due modi distinti. Alla percezione propria di un sesso corrispondono atti e strumenti propri di quel sesso. Non solo vedono il mondo da diverse angolazioni e con diverse sfumature, ma ben presto imparano che di ogni cosa esiste anche un altro lato.⁸⁶

Ancora più inquietanti le sue opinioni in campo medico. Con l’attenuante, però, che alcune delle sue critiche sul costo dei trattamenti sono dettate non tanto da preoccupazioni eugeniche ma di giustizia distributiva, dal fatto che i ricchi possono permettersi le cure più costose mentre la maggioranza più povera non può permettersi neanche le cure di base.

Ancora non siamo alla chirurgia cardiaca come normale assistenza medica… Al contrario, una clinica per il trapianto di organi ci appare come uno scandaloso giocattolo che giustifica un’alta concentrazione di medici a Bogota…

Purtroppo non è chiaro a tutti che la maggioranza dei latino-americani non può permettersi un’assistenza ospedaliera di nessun genere…⁸⁷

E giustamente si chiede che senso ha destinare una grossa fetta delle spese mediche a tenere ancora in vita ancora per qualche giorno una persona legata alle macchine, invece di lasciarlo morire in pace a casa sua.⁸⁸

Ci sono momenti però in cui è difficile capire se Illich condanna la medicina moderna semplicemente perché permette di vivere un po’ di più ma con spese enormi, o se pensa che la vecchiaia oltre un certo punto rappresenti una vita troppo meschina e accusi la medicina di scaricare sulla società i costi di così tanti anziani, o ancora se riesca anche solo a vedere una differenza tra le due cose.

La medicina non può far molto per i mali che si accompagnano alla senescenza. Non può guarire le malattie cardiovascolari, la maggior parte dei tumori, l’artrite, la sclerosi multipla o la cirrosi avanzata. Qualcuno dei malanni di cui soffrono gli anziani può essere talvolta alleviato. Di massima, le cure dei vecchi che comportano un intervento professionale non soltanto aggravano le loro sofferenze ma, se l’intervento riesce, le protraggono. Sorprende quindi la quantità delle risorse che si spendono per curare la vecchiaia. Solo il 10 per cento della popolazione degli Stati Uniti è di età superiore a sessantacinque anni, ma a questa minoranza va il 28 per cento della spesa per l’assistenza sanitaria. Rispetto al resto della popolazione i vecchi stanno aumentando a un tasso del 3 per cento, mentre il costo pro capite della loro assistenza cresce nella misura del 6 per cento. La gerontologia si sta appropriando del Prodotto Nazionale Lordo. Questa squilibrata allocazione di energie umane, mezzi e attenzione sociale non potrà che generare sofferenze indicibili man mano che aumenteranno le richieste e si esauriranno le risorse.⁸⁹

Altrove Illich non esita a scagliarsi contro chi vorrebbe allungare la vita di chi (definito “imperfetto”, un termine piuttosto disarmante) in condizioni da lui definite “naturali” morirebbe.

Oltre a ciò, la professione medica fomenta la malattia puntellando una società malsana che non solo conserva industrialmente i suoi minorati ma alleva clienti per il terapista con metodo cibernetico. Infine, le cosiddette professioni sanitarie hanno un potere patogeno indiretto, un effetto che nega strutturalmente la salute. Trasformano la sofferenza, la malattia e la morte da impegno personale in problema tecnico, espropriando così la gente d’ogni capacità di misurarsi autonomamente con la propria condizione umana.⁹⁰

Cosa c’è di più inequivocabilmente eugenico della sua denuncia del fatto che “sempre più persone con difetti vivono una vita puramente clinica”?⁹¹

Il tono ricorda quello di certi fondamentalisti contrari all’uso di anestetici durante il parto perché vanno contro la maledizione di Eva scagliata da Dio.

Ogni cultura era la somma delle regole grazie alle quali l’individuo si conciliava con la sofferenza, la malattia e la morte, le interpretava e provava compassione per gli altri, soggetti alle medesime minacce. Ogni cultura creava i miti, i rituali, i tabù e le norme etiche necessari per far fronte alla fragilità della vita. La civiltà medica cosmopolita nega che l’uomo abbia bisogno di accettare questi mali. È concepita e organizzata al fine di sopprimere la sofferenza, eliminare la malattia e lottare contro la morte.⁹² …

Illich accusa la professione medica di voler negare il dolore e la morte come cose (in parte) inevitabili della vita, e di interferire con la possibilità di ognuno di attingere alle proprie risorse culturali per affrontare il dolore e la morte attribuendo loro un significato in quanto fatti inevitabili. Fin qui la critica è lecita. Ma dal linguaggio usato ripetutamente pare di capire che anche alleviare il dolore e la sofferenza quando questi non sono inevitabili è un male, perché sopportare la sofferenza nobilita la persona.⁹³

Numerosissime virtù altro non sono che i diversi aspetti di quella fortezza d’animo che tradizionalmente permetteva alla gente di accogliere come una prova le sensazioni dolorose e di modellare in conseguenza il proprio comportamento. La pazienza, la sopportazione, il coraggio, la rassegnazione, l’autocontrollo, la perseveranza, la mansuetudine esprimono ciascuna una diversa sfumatura delle risposte con le quali le sensazioni dolorose venivano accettate, trasformate nell’esperienza del soffrire e sopportare. Il dovere, l’amore, il fascino, la routine, la preghiera, la compassione erano alcuni dei mezzi grazie ai quali il dolore veniva sostenuto con dignità. Le culture tradizionali rendevano ognuno responsabile del suo comportamento sotto l’impatto del male fisico o morale. Il dolore era riconosciuto come una componente inevitabile della realtà soggettiva del proprio corpo, nella quale ognuno si trova costantemente e che viene costantemente modellata dalle reazioni coscienti che ognuno le oppone. La gente sapeva di dover guarire da sola, di dover fare i conti da sola con la propria emicrania, col proprio difetto o con la propria afflizione. …

Le culture tradizionali e la civiltà tecnologica partono da assunti opposti. In ogni cultura tradizionale la psicoterapia, i sistemi di credenze e i farmaci necessari per contrastare la maggior parte del dolore sono incorporati nel comportamento quotidiano e riflettono la convinzione che la realtà è aspra e la morte ineluttabile. Nella distopia del ventesimo secolo, la necessità di sopportare una realtà dolorosa, interna o esterna, è vista come un difetto del sistema socioeconomico e il dolore è considerato un’emergenza accidentale da affrontare con interventi straordinari.⁹⁴

Le sue parole ricordano il personaggio di John Savage che (nel film Brave New World, NdT) denuncia la civilizzazione dei Controllori sulla base del fatto che alleviare il dolore invece di insegnare a sopportarlo scredita la vita.

È difficile non concludere che secondo Illich allungare la vita, alleviare il dolore e rendere sopportabile (entro limiti molto stretti) l’esistenza dei malati cronici sono di per sé cose illecite.

In tal modo, per l’uomo industriale, la sofferenza suscita ormai solo una domanda tecnica: cosa devo per curare o fare sparire questa sofferenza? Se poi essa persiste, la colpa non è dell’universo, di Dio, dei miei peccati o del diavolo, ma del sistema sanitario. La sofferenza esprime la domanda, da parte del consumatore, di maggiori prestazioni sanitarie. Diventando non necessaria, è divenuta intollerabile. … Solo il ricupero della volontà e capacità di soffrire può restituire sanità al dolore.⁹⁵

Chi merita di vivere e chi no è deciso sulla base di criteri inflessibili. Ogni tentativo di prolungare la vita dei malati cronici “si traduce in una manutenzione tecnica della vita ad alti livelli di malessere subletale.⁹⁶”

Illich considera sbagliata per principio l’idea “che la morte naturale debba sopraggiungere soltanto al termine di una vecchiaia trascorsa in buona salute” o “[l]a richiesta che i medici lottino contro la morte e mantengano in salute i vecchi cadenti…⁹⁷” Fa paura leggere questo linguaggio che ricorda gli attuali negazionisti del covid, che rifiutano il vaccino perché “noi abbiamo il nostro sistema immunitario”:

La salute esprime un processo di adattamento. E il risultato non dell’istinto, ma di una risposta autonoma e vitale a una realtà vissuta. Denota la capacità di adattarsi al mutare degli ambienti, di crescere e d’invecchiare, di guarire quando si sta male, di soffrire e di attendere serenamente la morte. La salute abbraccia anche il futuro, e quindi include l’angoscia e le risorse interiori per accettarla.

La fragilità, l’individualità e le connessioni dell’uomo, se vissute consapevolmente, fanno dell’esperienza del dolore, della malattia e della morte una parte integrante della sua vita. La capacità di affrontare questo trio in modo autonomo è essenziale alla sua salute.⁹⁸

Ad un certo punto sembra condannare tutte quelle forme di intervento medico che impediscono il compito della “natura”:

Fino a tempi non lontani la medicina si sforzava di valorizzare ciò che avviene in natura: favoriva la tendenza delle ferite a sanarsi, del sangue a coagularsi, dei batteri a farsi sopraffare dall’immunità naturale. Oggi invece essa cerca di materializzare i sogni della ragione. I contraccettivi orali, per esempio, vengono ordinati “per prevenire un evento normale nelle persone sane”. Certe terapie inducono l’organismo a interagire con delle molecole o delle macchine in modi che non hanno precedenti nell’evoluzione. I trapianti implicano la completa obliterazione delle difese immunologiche programmate geneticamente.⁹⁹

Illich sembra esitare un po’ davanti ai termini più duri, spiega che non chiede di vietare le pratiche che tengono in vita i malati cronici:

Sprofessionalizzare non vuol dire eliminare la medicina moderna, né ostacolare l’invenzione di una medicina nuova, né necessariamente far ritorno a programmi, riti e metodi antichi: significa che nessun professionista deve avere il potere di elargire a un qualunque suo paziente un complesso di mezzi terapeutici maggiore di quello che ciascun cittadino per proprio conto potrebbe rivendicare. Infine, sprofessionalizzare la medicina non significa perdere di vista i particolari bisogni che si hanno in momenti particolari della vita – quando si nasce, ci si rompe una gamba, ci si sposa, si partorisce, si diventa invalidi o si affronta la morte –: significa solo che la gente ha il diritto di vivere in un ambiente ospitale queste fasi salienti della propria esistenza.¹⁰⁰

Ma sono parole in minoranza.

Per concludere, Illich è una ricca fonte di intuizioni originali riguardo il funzionamento del mondo capitalista, intuizioni ulteriormente sviluppabili con grande beneficio. Ma per fare ciò non bisogna accettare tutto acriticamente, bisogna prima fare una cernita e individuare gli elementi problematici.

Note

1. Ivan Illich, La convivialità.

2. Ivi.

3. Ivi.

4. Ivi.

5. Ivi.

6. Ivi.

7. Illich, “Disabling Professions,” in Illich, ed., Disabling Professions (London: Marion Boyars, 1977), p. 34.

8. Illich, La convivialità.

9. Ivi.

10. Illich, Lavoro ombra. Illich in realtà non accetta che il lavoro vernacolare sia confuso con il settore informale o la sussistenza o altro.Convenzionalmente, per settore informale si intende sia il lavoro vernacolare che quello che Illich chiama “lavoro ombra”. Quest’ultimo è lavoro informale non retribuito al servizio del capitale, non un’alternativa ad esso. Vedi: Illich, Lavoro ombra.

La scelta tra consumo ad alto contenuto di lavoro, forse meno disumano, meno distruttivo e meglio organizzato, e le forme moderne di sussistenza è familiare a sempre più persone. Questa scelta corrisponde alla differenza tra un’economia ombra che in espansione e il recupero del dominio vernacolare. Ivi.

11. Illich, Lavoro ombra.

12. Illich, La convivialità.

13. Illich, Nemesi medica.

14. Illich, La convivialità.

15. Ivi.

16. Ivi.

17. Illich, “Disabling Professions”, in Illich, ed., Disabling Professions (Lodon: Marion Boyars, 1977), p. 28.

18. Illich, La convivialità

19. Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

20. Illich, Nemesi medica.

21. Illich, La convivialità.

22. Ivi.

23. Ivi.

24. Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

25. Illich, La convivialità.

26. Illich, Disabling Professions, p. 33.

27. Vedi Carson, The Anarchist Thought of Colin Ward (Center For a Stateless Society, 2014) <http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/colinward.pdf>.

28. Illich, La convivialità.

29. Ivi.

30. Ivi.

31. Ivi.

32. Paul Goodman, People or Personnel, in People or Personnel e Like a Conquered Province (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 115. “Ovunque,” nota “qualunque cosa si faccia o si fabbrichi c’è un ricarico del 300 o 400 percento.” Ivi, p. 120.

33. Illich, Nemesi medica.

34. Ivi.

35. Illich, Descolarizzare la società.

36. Illich, La convivialità.

37. Ivi.

38. Illich, Descolarizzare la società.

39. Ivi.

40. Illich, La convivialità.

41. Illich, La disoccupazione utile e i suoi nemici professionali in Per una storia dei bisogni.

42. Illich, Descolarizzare la società.

43. Illich, “Disabling Professions,” in Illich, ed., Disabling Professions (London: Marion Boyars, 1977), p. 29.

44. Illich, Descolarizzare la società.

45. Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni, Introduzione.

46. Ivi.

47. Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

48. Ivi.

49. Illich, “Disabling Professions,” in Illich, ed., Disabling Professions (London: Marion Boyars, 1977), p. 12.

50. Illich, Nemesi medica.

51. Illich, La convivialità.

52. Illich, Nemesi medica.

53. Ivi.

54. Illich, La convivialità.

55. “Energia e equità”, in: Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

56. “Dwelling,” in Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses, 1978-1990 (London and New York: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1992), pp. 58-59.

57. “Energia e equità”, in: Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

58. Carson, We Are All Degrowthers. We Are All Ecomodernists. Analysis of a Debate (Center For a Stateless Society, 2019) <https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/We-Are-All-Degrowthers_We-Are-All-Ecomodernists_Carson.pdf>.

59. Illich, La convivialità.

60. Ivi.

61. Ivi.

62. Ivi.

63. “La disoccupazione utile e i suoi nemici professionali”, in: Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

64. Vedi, tra l’altro, la mia introduzione a Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, edito da Colin Ward e pubblicato da C4SS <https://c4ss.org/content/25051>.

65. Illich, La convivialità.

66. “La disoccupazione utile e i suoi nemici professionali”, in: Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

67. “Invece dell’istruzione”, in: Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

68. Ivi.

69. Kevin A. Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (C4SS, 2010) <https://kevinacarson.org/pdf/hir.pdf>, pp. 178-179.

70. <https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Slide_1>; Carson, Homebrew Industrial Revolution, pp. 238-245.

71. Ivi, p. 90.

72. Illich, La convivialità.

73. Ivi.

74. Illich, Lavoro ombra.

75. Ivi.

76. Illich, Gender (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), p. 103.

77. Ivi.

78. Ivi.

79. Ivi.

80. Ivi.

81. Ivi.

82. Ivi.

83. Ivi.

84. Ivi.

85. Ivi.

86. Ivi.

87. Illich, “Planned Poverty: The End Result of Technical Assistance,” in Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1971, 1973), p. 131.

88. Illich, Nemesi medica.

89. “Bisogni di Tantalo”, in: Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

90. Ivi.

91. Illich, Nemesi medica.

92. “Bisogni di Tantalo”, in: Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

93. Illich, Nemesi medica.

94. Ivi.

95. “Bisogni di Tantalo”, in: Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

96. Illich, Nemesi medica.

97. “Bisogni di Tantalo”, in: Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

98. Ivi.

99. Illich, Nemesi medica.

100. “Bisogni di Tantalo”, in: Illich, Per una storia dei bisogni.

Oleh: James C. Wilson. Teks aslinya berjudul “What if Your Child Was Trans?” Diterjemahkan ke Bahasa Indonesia oleh Iman Amirullah.

Saya telah bertahun-tahun mengadvokasi hak-hak trans, termasuk hak-hak trans remaja dan orang tua mereka, dengan pendampingan dokter, untuk memilih jenis layanan kesehatan yang mereka butuhkan. Saya melihat kebebasan ini sebagai bentuk menyelamatkan kehidupan.

Meskipun begitu, saya berasal dari latar belakang konservatif, dimana sejauh yang saya tahu, banyak orang yang akan tidak setuju terhadap pandangan saya ini. Semua orang yang pernah terlibat dengan gerakan libertarianisme selama dekade terakhir tentu akan kerap menemui orang-orang transfobik dan reaksioner. Oleh sebab itu, saya kerap mendapat pertanyaan, yang sering kali bersifat menyindir, tentang bagaimana saya akan menghadapi anak yang menderita disforia gender. Pertanyaan-pertanyaan seperti “Apakah kamu akan mendorong mereka untuk mengidentifikasi mereka sesuka diri mereka sendiri dan mendaftarkan mereka pada puberty blocker begitu ia menginginkannya?” atau “Apakah aku akan dapat menerima jika anakku melakukan operasi pengubahan jenis kelamin pada usia yang sangat muda?” Saya akan lebih memilih untuk menjawab pertanyaan ini melalui diskusi tentang apa yang akan saya lakukan dan tidak akan saya lakukan.

Jika saya merupakan ayah dari seorang anak, yang sedari lahir kukenal sebagai seorang laki-laki, dan kemudian anak ini pada usia lima tahun, merasa atau menginginkan dirinya menjadi seorang perempuan, apa yang akan kulakukan? Jika ini hanya terjadi sekali saja atau dalam fase singkat, saya mungkin berasumsi dia sedang menguji reaksi saya, melakukan eksperimen pikiran, mencari perhatian, atau dimotivasi oleh rasa cemburu terhadap teman-teman wanitanya. Ini mungkin memicu perbincangan dengannya, tapi saya ragu saya akan bereaksi keras, dan kemungkinan besar akan terlupakan dalam satu atau dua hari.

Namun, jika anak ini memiliki keyakinan yang kuat, ngotot, dan konsisten untuk menyatakan bahwa  ia adalah seorang perempuan dan terus-menerus mengungkapkan keyakinan ini tanpa henti selama bertahun-tahun. Pada antara usia 5 dan 10 tahun, jika ia terus mengungkapkan keinginannya untuk menjadi seorang perempuan, dan secara rutin mencoba untuk terlibat pada aktivitas yang bersifat feminin dan mengenakan pakaian feminin tanpa ada tanda-tanda bahwa hal ini didorong secara eksternal, maka ya, saya akan mengambil tindakan lebih lanjut.

Saya akan mencoba untuk tidak secara aktif mendorong atau mendiskreditkan keinginannya. Namun, saya akan mengajukan banyak pertanyaan: “Bagaimana yang kamu maksud? Dari mana kamu mengetahui hal ini? Apa yang membuatmu berpikir seperti ini, dll?” Saya tidak akan sekadar bertanya, namun melakukan apa yang seharusnya dilakukan semua orang tua: mengenal anak saya, dan menghadirkan suasana di mana mereka merasa nyaman berbicara secara terbuka dan menjadi diri mereka sendiri. Saya akan menunjukkan bahwa saya aman untuk diajak bicara.

Terlalu banyak remaja gay atau gender non-konformis, terutama mereka yang berasal dari keluarga dan komunitas konservatif, hidup dalam ketakutan bahwa bersikap terbuka tentang siapa diri mereka akan mengakibatkan pelecehan, pengucilan, cemoohan, atau berbagai hal lain yang lebih buruk lagi. Para transgender jauh lebih besar kemungkinannya untuk menjadi tunawisma, kehilangan pekerjaan, dan dikucilkan dari teman-teman dan keluarga mereka dibandingkan dengan para cis, dan pencegahan terhadap masalah tersebut sebenarnya dimulai dari rumah.

Saya juga akan mempelajari secara ekstensif semua literatur yang telah diverifikasi oleh rekan sejawat tentang jenis perilaku yang ditunjukkan anak tersebut dan mencari nasehat profesional dari berbagai profesional kesehatan mental sebelum menyetujui segala bentuk pengobatan. Jika, pada saat itu, dapat ditunjukkan bahwa anak tersebut adalah seseorang yang, terlepas dari apa pun yang saya katakan atau lakukan, akan memilih untuk bertransisi menjadi orang dewasa dan menjalani sisa hidupnya sebagai seorang wanita, saya akan menyetujui puberty blocker, karena ketika saya menolak melakukan hal tersebut, saya justru akan menghambat kebutuhannya.

Ketika ada bukti ilmiah bahwa penggunaan puberty blocker berdampak positif untuknya untuk jangka panjang, barulah saya akan menyetujuinya. Penting untuk dipahami bahwa dengan menolak akses puberty blocker bagi anak dengan disforia gender, Anda memaksa mereka melewati masa pubertas yang akan membuat tubuh mereka tidak seperti yang dirasakan oleh psikologi internal mereka dan kemungkinan besar akan memperburuk kesehatan mental mereka serta meningkatkan kemungkinan mereka untuk melakukan bunuh diri. Seharusnya tidak sulit untuk memahami mengapa seseorang yang kebahagiaannya ada pada penampilan sebagai sosok feminin akan dirugikan saat melalui masa pubertas sebagai laki-laki, dan sebaliknya bagi seseorang yang ingin tampil sebagai maskulin, dipaksa melalui masa pubertas seabagai perempuan. Lebih jauh lagi, jika negara melakukan hal tersebut maka hal tersebut merupakan bentuk penindasan yang dilakukan oleh pemerintah terhadap seseorang yang bertentangan dengan kebebasan individu dan temuan penelitian medis yang relevan.

Saya akan menggunakan kesempatan ini untuk menunjukkan bahwa tinjauan tahun 2020 oleh Child and Adolescent Mental Health menemukan bahwa puberty blocker terkait dengan “hasil positif seperti penurunan bunuh diri di masa dewasa, peningkatan pengaruh dan fungsi psikologis, serta peningkatan kehidupan sosial.”

Selain itu, survei tahun 2020 yang dipublikasikan di Pediatrics menemukan bahwa “Ada hubungan terbalik yang signifikan antara pemberian pengobatan dengan puberty blocker selama masa remaja dan keinginan bunuh diri seumur hidup di kalangan transgender dewasa yang menginginkan pengobatan ini.”

Studi tahun 2022 yang dipublikasikan dalam Journal of American Medical Association menemukan fakta bahwa “mereka yang menerima terapi gender, termasuk puberty blocker dan terapi hormon, memiliki kemungkinan 60% lebih rendah untuk mengalami depresi sedang atau berat dan 73% lebih rendah kemungkinan untuk melakukan bunuh diri usai menjalani terapi hingga 12 bulan.”

Demikian pula untuk penggunaan hormon cros-sex yang diresepkan dokter, sebagaimana dicatat dalam studi tahun 2022 dari Journal of Adolescent Health, yang menemukan “penggunaan (terapi hormon) GAHT dikaitkan dengan kemungkinan lebih rendah untuk mengalami depresi dan keinginan bunuh diri  dibandingkan dengan mereka yang menginginkan GAHT tetapi tidak mendapatkannya. Bagi remaja di bawah usia 18 tahun, GAHT dikaitkan dengan kemungkinan lebih rendah untuk mengalami depresi dan keinginan bunuh diri dalam satu tahun.

Pada titik percakapan ini, saya kemudian akan ditanya tentang operasinya. Apakah saya akan “baik-baik saja” jika alat kelamin anak saya dimodifikasi melalui operasi? Seringkali, ungkapan “dipotong” atau “dimutilasi” dilontarkan,” dan sering kali, ada anggapan bahwa hal ini akan terjadi pada usia yang sangat muda.

Operasi penggantian alat kelamin, sebagai pengobatan untuk disforia gender, biasanya dilakukan pada orang berusia 18 tahun ke atas, sehingga sebagian besar dari pertanyaan ini tidak realistis. Artinya, semakin ekstrim intervensi medis yang diusulkan, dan semakin muda orang yang menerimanya, semakin besar pula beban pembuktian yang harus dipenuhi oleh orang yang mengusulkan agar saya dapat menyetujuinya.

Saya pernah ditanya dalam konteks ini: “Anda tidak memiliki satu masalah pun dengan hal tersebut, dan Anda akan 1000% menyetujui SEMUA hal tersebut?” Saya menjawab: “Tidak, saya tidak 1000% atau bahkan 100% setuju dengan SEMUA itu. Faktanya, itu semua membuatku agak tidak nyaman. Namun, saya akan melakukan tindakan apapun yang didukung oleh bukti empiris daripada sekadar mengikuti emosi saya.”

Saya pikir ada ruang untuk perdebatan yang terbuka ​​mengenai seberapa tepat pembatasan medis untuk remaja trans, terutama pada usia yang lebih muda. Namun penentangan absolut dari kelompok sosial konservatif tidak nampak seperti perdebatan tersebut.

Debat yang terbuka ​​melibatkan mengetahui apa yang Anda bicarakan, mengakui di mana Anda kurang ahli, mengakui bahwa Anda mungkin salah tentang suatu hal, dan mengakui poin-poin dan kekhawatiran yang dibuat oleh pihak lain. Hal ini mencakup mengetahui apa yang dikatakan oleh penelitian yang telah diverifikasi oleh rekan sejawat, dan memahami topik-topik seperti standar diagnosis, dan kelayakan untuk mendapatkan pengobatan. Hal ini harus dilakukan oleh orang-orang dengan latar belakang medis yang sesuai, dan bukan oleh politisi, provokator, dan tradisionalis.

Terlepas dari gambaran yang ditampilkan oleh media sayap kanan, penelitian mengenai topik ini sebenarnya cenderung menemukan hasil positif dari operasi penegasan gender. Misalnya, studi tahun 2021 dari peneliti Harvard yang menemukan bahwa operasi penegasan gender mengurangi tekanan psikologis dan keinginan bunuh diri, dan bahkan mengurangi kebiasaan merokok.

Meskipun demikian, saya tidak akan begitu saja mendorong saran apa pun yang ditolak: saya akan mempertanyakan, membantah, berperan menjadi kontrarian, mengeksplorasi kemungkinan pilihan lain, dan mendapatkan opini kedua, ketiga, keempat, dan kelima di setiap langkah proses. Saya mungkin akan mondar-mandir sepanjang malam, bertanya-tanya apakah saya menangani situasi ini dengan tepat. Semuanya akan sangat menegangkan bagi saya. Namun, yang pasti tidak akan saya lakukan adalah mengabaikan apa yang dialami anak saya, dan saya juga tidak akan mencoba memaksakan peran gender pada anak saya, seperti yang saya lihat banyak kaum konservatif sosial katakan akan mereka lakukan dan seperti yang telah dilakukan banyak orang, kemungkinan besar akan berakibat tragis.

Para tradisionalis dan konservatif selalu dengan penuh semangat untuk mendemonisasi kaum trans, sebagai cara untuk menjaga basis sosial-politik mereka. Sebagai tanggapan, para politisi Partai Republik secara agresif mengajukan dan mengesahkan ratusan rancangan undang-undang anti-trans di seluruh Amerika Serikat. RUU ini akan meningkatkan kesengsaraan, depresi, dan bunuh diri. Selain itu, retorika yang menyertainya kemungkinan besar akan mendorong tindakan kekerasan terhadap orang-orang yang dianggap tidak sesuai dengan peran gender yang ada di masyarakat. Semua argumen pendukung mereka melibatkan kesalahan dalam mengartikan bukti, konspirasi, dan menggunakan emosi serta kemarahan secara keliru. Namun, saya rasa hasil seperti ini sudah dapat ditebak untuk terjadi pada negara-negara yang reaksioner dan otoriter, seperti yang selalu terjadi pada kaum konservatif sosial.

Seluruh hasil publikasi didanai sepenuhnya oleh donasi. Jika kalian menyukai karya-karya kami, kalian dapat berkontribusi dengan berdonasi. Temukan petunjuk tentang cara melakukannya di halaman Dukung C4SS: https://c4ss.org/dukung-c4ss.

Anarchism is an odd beast and effective advocacy takes a multitude of forms. During the past year, the team behind the Center for a Stateless Society has been focused on exploring how we can best explain and defend the idea of vibrant social cooperation without aggression, oppression, or centralized authority. With limited resources, both financially and in terms of contributor’s time, we must take the time to reflect on our goals, our tactics, and our path forward, changing with the world around us, the social landscape, and the available communications technology.  

This work of planning, rebuilding, and redirecting can be easy to write off. It’s not linear and it’s not nearly as much fun as plunging forward once new paths are forged. But it allows us to do more careful and far-reaching work, providing a much-needed counter-balance to the array of violent and authoritarian political perspectives that dominate the modern political landscape. 

One recent example of which I’m quite proud is our contributors’ coverage of the October Hamas attack and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza. While often horrifying to consider, our writers’ coverage reminded me why our work is so important. As did the considerations I had to make while drafting a call for commentary that stated our collective position clearly and conscientiously.

This is what we do well and hope to keep doing. Preserving a space for nuanced, caring, and yet radical thought, having the hard conversations on what it takes to build a new world, and never accepting the ease of pat answers when effective progress demands we confront the thorny dissonance of modern society and global well-being.

In 2023, we did a lot of reflection. Many of us on the coordinator team faced major life changes and have been working to restructure our workflow towards more efficient uses of our time and energy. I’d like to give a huge shout-out to everyone who worked on the coordinator team in 2023, y’all have been amazing to work with and I’m honored to be part of such an inspiring group of people: 

Translations Coordinator
Enrico Sanna

Editing Coordinator
Eric Fleischmann

Editors
Evan Pierce
Fen
Row

Audio/Visual Coordinators
Can Standke

Financial Coordinator
James Tuttle

Technical Coordinator
William Gillis

Mutual Exchange Coordinator
Cory Massimino

Podcast Coordinator
Zak Woodman

---

One fun opportunity we had this year was a few of us camping together for the Coup de Gras Festival this past February. We spent many hours in front of a campfire or waiting along parade routes discussing the work of promoting market anarchism, the future of C4SS, and the challenges we face in the current political climate. We were reminded how important it is to get together in person, and how wide-ranging and unwieldy the work of promoting market anarchism really is. As well as the importance of seeking feedback and talking to people outside our traditional audience. 

Between this meeting and others, there are a lot of new ideas floating around within the minds of the C4SS team. I’ve included some that have come to fruition in this past month (January 24) both to show how all that quiet work last year has bloomed already in 2024 and because I took forever to finish this report (please forgive me!). 

For those reading, we’d love to have more voices in the discussion and more hands on deck to help us navigate these complicated times. As you consider the updates below, I hope you feel engaged in the projects we’re pursuing. And I encourage anyone supportive of the Center to reach out about taking part in the behind-the-scenes work of keeping the wheels rolling.

My three major goals for the year are to:

1. Be more accessible.

Last year we didn’t get to as many book fairs, conferences, or other events as we usually do. While this is disappointing, it was unavoidable due to both financial constraints and the increased travel distance faced by many of our coordinators. On the upside, we were able to attend Students For Liberty’s LibertyCon in both 2023 and – just this past weekend – in 2024.

This is always a rewarding experience. Reaching young folks who may not even have heard of market anarchism or mutualism and introducing them to the broader reality of political and philosophical thought is always exciting. And our tabling crew made quite a splash, selling a good deal of books and giving out plenty of stickers, zines, and pins. We’re also planning to have representatives at more of our usual haunts in 2024, including the NYC Anarchist Bookfair.

Of course, these events all require a bit of spending, whether on travel, book shipping, or tabling, and the more support we can get from our followers and friends, the more outreach we can do at events like this. If you’re interested in attending a conference or book fair on behalf of C4SS, please do get in touch at editor@c4ss.org and we can discuss it! You can also help by supporting us on Patreon.

The regular funding offered by Patreon subscriptions allows us to plan out the year more effectively and it gives our supporters more access to the team. One option we’re considering for this year is to open up portions of the C4SS discord server to Patreon supporters so we can discuss more directly the future of the Center, our work, and possible collaborations.

While 2023 was very light in terms of bonus content and Patreon specials, we’re hoping to make 2024 a more exciting year for patrons. Look out for a bonus video on “go bags” from yours truly in the coming months as well as more one-off bonus content from folks on the team. 

2. Keep exploring new media.

Our Patreon was started in part to support the podcast program and we’re very grateful for all the help, which has allowed us to host two ongoing shows, The Enragés and Mutual Exchange Radio. While these two shows will be changing in format a bit, this year, we’ll be adding a new monthly show with Cory Massimino and Roderick Long.

The Long Library, a new, long-format podcast, features deep dives into Rodericks’s vast collection of work and interviews on different topics in market anarchism. Check out the first episode on Long’s 2004 monograph “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections.”  in either audio or video (below) format! And look out for February’s episode on the 2008 Cato Unbound contribution Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now.

With MER and The Enragés, we’ll be producing slightly fewer episodes to allow our editing and hosting team to accommodate the new show and our ever-shifting responsibilities. While there won’t be episodes every single month, we will be releasing new episodes as regularly as we’re able. Our first MER episode for 2024 will feature Akiva Malament and Mikayla Novak on their work regarding gender as an emergent order. 

If you have ideas for guests we should reach out to, or want to contribute to the podcast program as a host, editor, or researcher, please do reach out! We love getting feedback on these shows and want to cover the issues that are important to our audience. 

3. Cover the issues in ways no one else can.

I began this reflection with our contributors’ treatment of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Our ability to cover these issues with not only careful thought and respect for humanity but also with an unflinching commitment to anarchist values and clear-eyed assessments of the evidence remains C4SS’s most important contribution to anarchism. 

Many of our deepest thinkers got together from January 15-18th in New York when C4SS scholars presented at our parent organization The Molinari Society’s mostly-annual Eastern Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. One panel tackled the thorny issues of Nation-States, Nationalism, and Oppression while the other explored Topics in Radical Liberalism.

We hope this work will advance political and philosophical thought in meaningful ways and maintain anarchism’s influence in both popular thought and academic conversations. To that end, we’ve continued to publish the important work of independent scholar Kevin Carson. His most recent studies published at the Center include The Undeclared Condominium: The USSR As Partner in a Conservative World Order and a revised and updated version of Intellectual Property: A Libertarian Critique. Look out for a few more studies this month as well, going live on Tuesdays in February. 

Thank you to everyone who has contributed time, work, money, ideas, and encouragement to any of these various projects. We really couldn’t do it without all these hands on deck and we appreciate contributions in all forms. We are currently hurting a bit for contributions of time and energy. If you have some to spare and would like to work on any C4SS project, please reach out to editor@c4ss.org. We’re particularly in need of editors, both for written pieces as well as audio and video. Graphic design support would also be helpful. 

If you’d like to support the Center financially, Patreon is still the best way to do that! Our finances have been stretched a bit as various services we rely on have increased their fees. But we hope to continue delivering the same output of written commentary, studies, translations, and audio and video content. 

We’ve had to start pro-rating translation payments, which means we can’t pay our translators what they deserve, or publish as many translations. Your support on Patreon allows us to keep the wheels rolling and pay all our contributors what they deserve. 

You can also make a direct one-time donation through either Stripe (click the link or scan the QR code to the right) or Venmo (@c4ss-dot-org). Purchasing books, stickers, buttons, and more at the C4SS Counter-Economic Store is a wonderful way to support the Center while exploring the ideas of market anarchism, or representing them out in the world.

Thank you all again for an amazing year in 2023. While I’m often worried about the future of humanity and the general thrust of global politics, the work we do does give me hope and illuminates a way forward into the unknown future. 

With love and solidarity, 

 

Alex McHugh

…but It Did Determine Our Regime of Property

“You fools! If you took might, freedom would come of itself.”- Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

On December 12th, 2023 the AFL-CIO Facebook page posted a meme that stated “Elon Musk doesn’t create cars, Jeff Bezos doesn’t deliver Amazon packages, Howard Shultz doesn’t make Starbucks drinks. The rich don’t create value. The workers do.” Of course there were the usual defenders of capitalism flooding the comments section with their typical anti-labor pronouncements. One such comment read “Imagine going into an economics class and saying that entrepreneurship doesn’t create value.” Meanwhile, another commenter asked, “If the rich didn’t start the company, then what?” Finally, the centrist appeared and declared that “Both create value. How can you have one without the other?” The former two comments are indicative of the bog standard neo-liberal belief that workers are some sort of superfluous appendage, and that all of the wealth in society comes from the grandiose entrepreneur god-men. It is the rich who have descended from their lofty palaces in the clouds, capital in hand, to bestow upon us the glorious jobs we have been blessed with. Nevermind where the initial capital came from, it always existed, ex nihilo. The latter is a sad, but well meaning attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. But, as it says in the IWW preamble:

The working class and employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.  

Naturally, as a militant advocate of labor, my response was to leap to the AFL-CIO’s defense by posting the following comment: “For the goons confused about how you can’t have labor without capital, read up. Capital COMES from labor.” I then dropped a link to Thomas Hodgskin’s Labor Defended Against Capital, as any self described mutualist might. Unfortunately my OCD-addled brain wouldn’t let this one rest. I began to over-think the subject as I am prone to do. I set about attempting to define a clear boundary between wealth and value. My instinct has always been to view debates surrounding value theories as important, but not central. They are secondary concerns when it comes to the defense of labor. After all, why does it matter how value is derived if the workers do the work either way? Value could be proven once and for all to be entirely subjective, and in my view, and in the views of many, it would not alter the moral claim of labor over the fruits of its toil one bit. 

This is because workers, unsurprisingly, do all the work. Without workers nothing outside of what nature produces on its own would exist, valuable or not. Meanwhile, without capitalists, everything would continue as usual because the only function of a capitalist is, unsurprisingly, to hold and allocate capital. So, what is capital? Capital is nothing more than some type of resource. It’s a fancy word for stuff that has utility. People are perfectly capable of allocating resources without capitalists via libertarian structures such as workers councils or mutual banks. A lone capitalist on the other hand can’t produce a single product or service without workers. In short, capitalists inherently need workers, and while workers inherently need capital, they don’t inherently need capitalists since capitalists are merely people who own capital. Obviously then, if workers own the capital, they don’t need capitalists anymore. Once this epiphany has been reached it is easy enough to conclude that the value of a product or service could be based on labor time, or the subjective preference of the consumer and it would not change this fact in the slightest. To put it simply, a pencil is made in a factory by workers and there is no intellectual theory that can alter that physical fact any more than any theory can alter the physical existence of oxygen. The system by which people assign a price to that spoon is secondary to its actual construction. And finally there’s the elephant in the room; state violence. The only reason capitalists are able to own as much capital as they do is because there’s a legion of state sanctioned killers ready to defend their claims. 

Finally I asked myself, are we even debating the right subject? Are value theories really what we need to focus on? Perhaps instead we should be asking ourselves how society even got to a point where these discussions seem so important in the first place? And that’s when I realized that before we can even talk about any of this we need to establish how order is arrived at. Without order there can be no society of any kind and the entire question is irrelevant. Without society there is no property of any kind; neither public, private, cooperative, or communal. Without property there can be no exchange, and finally without exchange there is no value. 

On the subject of order I conclude that force is the primary cause of order, because force is necessary to ensure security. No society can exist if it is unable to defend itself against external threats. This is true for all societies, statist or stateless, it doesn’t matter. At first one might be tempted to reach for an authoritarian conclusion if positioned upon this premise. But force as a concept is perfectly compatible with anti authoritarianism if it’s not being employed for the purpose of domination, but is instead being employed to defend against domination. It’s the difference between using force to initiate an assault, and using force to stop an assault in progress. As I stated in a previous essay of mine, all property is maintained through force. This applies to community property just as much as private or state property. The question revolves not around the presence or absence of force, but around who is using force against who, and to what end?  

If a community is only using force against those who initiate violence for the purpose of extraction, dispossession, or domination then it’s not a state and is not acting in an authoritarian manner. If force is used by an elite class against an underclass, there is a state. In this scenario the first “who” in question is an elite society apart from the working class, the group they are using violence against is the working class, they are the second “who.” The end goal is to establish a relationship of extraction, dispossession, and domination. In a scenario where there is no state, the first “who” becomes the community of equals, either directly via their own power or via a third party they have contracted with, and the second “who” becomes only those seeking to exploit, dispossess, or dominate. The end goal is the maintenance of a stateless, or horizontal society of equals. This is what I mean by who is using force against who, and to what end.

In Proudhon’s famous 1840 work, What is Property?, he says that “[s]ociety finds its highest perfection in the union of order with anarchy.” If we accept that anarchy in this context refers to an absence of rulers, and not chaos, then we can accept that a federated network of autonomous communities might collectively defend one another from would-be aggressors. In this scenario the people as a whole have taken might, as Stirner says. They have banded together as freely contracting individuals to mutually guarantee one another’s freedom from aggressors and exploiters. Here, there exists no monopoly on violence, no special defensive apparatus, but instead there exists a dispersed array of collective force. Now let’s drop all of these people and communities onto a desert island where no one owns any property as of yet. How do they decide who owns what? For this exercise I find it useful to borrow a concept from the medical community: informed consent. According to the National Library of Medicine, informed consent is defined in the following manner: 

Informed consent is the process in which a health care provider educates a patient about the risks, benefits, and alternatives of a given procedure or intervention. The patient must be competent to make a voluntary decision about whether to undergo the procedure or intervention.

 Lets tweak that slightly to make it useful to our situation by replacing a few words. After the alterations have been made it might read in the following manner: 

Informed consent is the process by which a community of freely associating individuals discusses the risks, benefits, and alternatives of a given regime of property. All individuals in the community must be competent to make a voluntary decision about whether or not to adopt a proposed regime of property.

Now, back to the main point: I find the question of consent to be of great importance, as any anarchist or reasonable person in general should. If people do not consent to the basic foundations of the society which they have found themselves in, then the word voluntary is nothing but coercion dressed in the garb of liberty. We must then ask ourselves, would a well informed group of freely associating individuals consent to the initial property regime that has led to our current predicament? I can’t imagine anyone would, I certainly know I wouldn’t. It’s highly likely that if people could start over, tabula rasa, that they would resort to communal forms of land distribution, occupation and use norms, or perhaps less likely, a regime involving a consistent application of the Lockean-proviso. No one who is aware of the long term consequences of a system that allows for one class to monopolize property at the expense of another would consent to it if given a better alternative to begin with. Even if the current property regime was not established through a long and violent process of enclosure, it’s unlikely that people would adopt such a regime if they knew from the outset that the end result would be a situation in which half of the population aren’t able to rent a one bedroom apartment. 

It is also reasonable to assume that if people have chosen to adopt communal or occupation and use property norms then those norms would very likely apply to the means of production as well, and as a result the means of production would de facto belong to those who use them. If that is the case, then the products produced using the means of production would also naturally belong to those who use them. In this scenario, value theory would only be relevant to discussions among equals, not between employers and employees. The workers who now own the means of production would certainly have to determine how to fairly distribute their products in situations that require a division of labor, such as an assembly line, or any other factory setting. However, they would not be having discussions about whether or not the fruits of labor belong to capitalists or laborers, because there would be no capitalists within such an anarchic order. There would only be free and equal people. 

The fact is, order is the prerequisite to even get to the question of who owns what. But, to avoid the trap of the state, logic would dictate that everyone has to be a property owner in some way, shape, or form. There can’t be haves and have nots, otherwise the community of elites will develop, and along with it the monopoly of violence and the economy of extraction which inevitably ends in statism. And this is all well in advance of smaller concerns such as theories of value. While value theories are certainly important when one begins to contemplate things like rates of pay, pricing mechanisms, and the distribution of goods, they are ultimately not the fulcrum of the social question that people make them out to be. At best, they are a secondary concern, at worst they can act as a red herring that distracts from the fundamentally unjust regime of property right in front of our faces. Might may not determine what is right or wrong, but it is certainly useful in determining the initial system which dictates who owns land, the means of production, and all of the conclusions that flow from that foundation. If the fundamental way our society arrived at the current order was through a violent conquest of one class or group by another, then laser focusing on the debate between LTV and STV is a bit like fixating on a stolen car while a murderer is on the loose. While you’re out chasing the thief, the bodies in the morgue keep piling up. 

Di Anon. Originale: A Story of Interest, del 31 gennaio 2024. Traduzione italiana di Enrico Sanna.

Prima di spiegare la mia vicenda, voglio precisare inequivocabilmente una cosa: oggi i governi occidentali favoriscono, fino alla complicità, l’eccidio dei palestinesi da parte di un governo israeliano estremista con intenzioni espressamente genocide. Quello che posso fare al riguardo è pochissimo, ma sarei moralmente in errore se ignorassi la realtà e non facessi niente per oppormi alla pulizia etnica del popolo palestinese attualmente in corso. E poi disonorerei i miei padri, che hanno rischiato la propria vita nella lotta contro altre violenze genocide del passato. Ora, dato che quel poco di potere che ho viene dal mio debito studentesco, dichiaro che non renderò neanche un centesimo ad un governo che è parte attiva della vergognosa carneficina che sta avendo luogo a Gaza. Non m’importa se il governo vende una portaerei o se risparmia qualche soldo non mandando sistemi JDAM da far piovere sui bambini. Non riconosco obblighi morali verso un debito contratto con quelle istituzioni che commettono crimini e atrocità contro l’umanità. Qualcuno adesso penserà che sto sfruttando l’attuale conflitto per evitare convenientemente di pagare il mio dovuto e vivere a sbafo, ma non è così. Ecco come ho utilizzato i nostri soldi:

Del prestito, circa 30 mila dollari, al netto delle tasse, sono stati donati come atto di protesta contro il nostro sistema economico e politico malato. Lo stato dispone tasse e piani infrastrutturali che servono unicamente a incanalare il denaro verso l’alto, verso i più ricchi, persone o aziende; per questo ho deciso di prendere parte dei fondi per l’istruzione e di ridistribuirli a persone e comunità che ne hanno bisogno. Ecco un breve elenco dei programmi a cui ho dato un aiuto finanziario:

• Serre comunitarie

• Orti comunitari

• Librerie di strumenti

• Un centro comunitario

• Educazione artistica per studenti in scuole sottofinanziate

• Un rifugio per i senzatetto

• Consulenza per la violenza giovanile

• Fiere dell’artigianato a sostegno di artigiani e artisti indipendenti

• Mostre artistiche comunitarie

• Laboratori di educazione e condivisione delle capacità

• Giornalismo locale

Ad ogni progetto ho donato tra i 300 e i 5 mila dollari. In più ci sono le microdonazioni, così tante che non posso elencarle tutte. Il mio era un atto cosciente di protesta, sentivo che avrebbe avuto conseguenze significative per me. Oggi il mio debito assomma a 80 mila dollari, e sinceramente non sarà mai reso. Vi racconto come sono arrivato a prendere la decisione di sacrificare la mia sicurezza finanziaria.

Sono un accademico ben avviato. Detto genericamente, studio le relazioni tra organizzazioni sociali e ambiente. Credo nell’importanza della materia e ho un importante curriculum di pubblicazioni. Ancora più importante, per me, è il mio ruolo di docente. Credo che la mia professione aiuti i giovani a diventare adulti indipendenti e cittadini. Ho grandi capacità, da quattro anni insegno nelle cinque università più quotate nel mondo. Il mio salario però è appena sopra il livello della povertà. Quattro degli ultimi sei anni li ho vissuti come senzatetto non registrato (tra divani, mansarde e ripari all’aperto). La ragione del mio basso salario è nella svalutazione sistemica nonché nella precarizzazione dell’insegnamento universitario. A dir molto, mi pagano un quinto delle ore lavorate: preparazione, incontri, cura pastorale e spese burocratiche non rientrano nella paga. A conti fatti, le ore pagate rispetto a quelle lavorate sono circa un decimo se si considerano altri obblighi come le pubblicazioni, le revisioni paritarie e le conferenze. A ciò si aggiungono decenni di politiche che hanno gonfiato artificialmente i costi dell’alloggio, così che oggi vivo praticamente alla giornata. Essendomi laureato nel 2008 e avendo terminato il dottorato nel 2020, si può dire che la mia esperienza accademica si è svolta durante la crisi globale.

Ho terminato la tesi poco prima dello scoppio della crisi finanziaria mondiale. Venendo da una famiglia monoparentale con scarse finanze, ho dovuto lavorare per mantenermi agli studi. Mi sono laureato senza debiti con un voto tra i più alti nella mia classe. Dopo aver imparato elementi di costruzione, ristrutturazione e risanamento alle superiori, durante il corso di laurea breve sono diventato artigiano qualificato. Ero giovane quando è scoppiata la crisi, il lavoro era pagato anche quindici dollari l’ora, più spesso dieci. Ho lavorato per gran parte di un quinquennio con l’acqua alla gola e sovraccaricando il mio fisico. Finché non mi sono stancato e ho deciso di prendere la specializzazione presso l’università statale più vicina. Pur svolgendo due lavori durante gli studi, sono riuscito a scrivere una tesi che mi ha dato accesso alle migliori università del mondo grazie ad una borsa di studio. È stato allora che ho deciso di chiedere un prestito studentesco per donarlo quasi tutto (ho tolto alcune spese relative all’istruzione). Vi spiego perché l’ho fatto e perché sono disposto ad accettarne le conseguenze.

In questi ultimi vent’anni, ho visto gli Stati Uniti imbarcarsi in numerose guerre illegali (di cui la guerra contro l’Iraq è l’esempio più clamoroso). Lo stato ha speso oltre ottomila miliardi di dollari in guerre disastrose, che hanno destabilizzato intere aree e traumatizzato moltissime famiglie, e che hanno portato benefici solo per l’industria delle armi e gli appalti militari. Allo stesso tempo, ci sono stati tagli fiscali per oltre seimila miliardi, il 65% dei quali sono andati a beneficio del 20% della società (il 40% circa al 5% più ricco). Oltre mille miliardi sono serviti a salvare grosse istituzioni finanziarie, o sono stati buttati in industrie fallite e piani governativi. Vedevo la mia famiglia e amici miei che perdevano casa e sostentamento a causa di frodi sistemiche, ho visto come gli 831 miliardi dell’American reinvestment act venivano usati per cose come rifare il fondo di campi da tennis, piantare alberi negli spartitraffico, oppure finivano nelle tasche di persone e aziende ben posizionate sotto forma di mancia politica. Per dieci degli ultimi quattordici anni, gli interessi a livello federale sono rimasti attorno allo 0,25% (arrivando al massimo al 2,5%). Grosse istituzioni bancarie e aziende si sono servite di questi bassi tassi per fare incetta di beni come gli alloggi, ma anche per acquistare le loro stesse azioni e incrementarne artificialmente la quotazione. Intanto gli studenti pagavano tra il 4,99 e il 7,54 percento di interesse per i prestiti di studio. Mentre i super ricchi nascondono il malloppo in conti all’estero, infermieri, insegnanti, assistenti sociali, scienziati e moltissimi altri affondano nel pantano del debito. Insomma, quello dei prestiti è un sistema rapace legato indissolubilmente a un’economia marcia, sostanzialmente un sistema mafioso a vantaggio dei super ricchi.

Il mio, insomma, è un atto di protesta contro un sistema politico e economico che toglie ricchezza alla maggioranza e concentra potere finanziario nelle mani di una minuscola élite. Tassi di interesse di favore per le aziende e i super ricchi, privatizzazione delle infrastrutture sociali e denaro destinato all’assistenza sociale utilizzato per assistere grandi aziende producono un monopolio elitario dell’offerta monetaria. E quelli che, come noi, non fanno parte dei privilegiati ma hanno capacità e voglia di svolgere attività assistenziali e culturali come l’insegnamento e l’assistenza sono costretti a indebitarsi fino all’osso semplicemente per avere il titolo di studio necessario per svolgere queste (malpagate) attività. Il risultato di queste politiche e relazioni istituzionali è che la nostra società dipende dai capricci e i voleri di una piccola minoranza che in materia di bisogni di base come la casa ha la precedenza sulle classi medie e i lavoratori. In altre parole, il nostro sistema finanziario e le nostre leggi sulla proprietà alimentano un feudalesimo economico che vive di rendita. Da quando la nostra società è diventata una plutocrazia che ruota attorno alle ambizioni di una casta, il sistema non risponde più alle responsabilità democratiche, è incapace di affrontare questioni sistemiche che vadano oltre ciò che serve a produrre profitti. Ma visto che in questa società le élite di potere e di censo dipendono dalla schiavitù del debito, perché non usare questo debito per far leva contro di loro? Il sistema distrugge le basi ecologiche e sociali della ricchezza e del benessere intergenerazionale. E l’unico modo per cominciare davvero a risolvere pacificamente questo intreccio di crisi è lo sciopero generale del debito, delle tasse e del lavoro.

Per protesta contro questo sistema assurdo e corrotto che ci governa, ho creato il mio mini piano di salvataggio. Alcune decine di migliaia di dollari saranno donate a varie comunità. Molte delle iniziative e delle attività a cui ho donato sono ancora attive, alcune sono addirittura diventate importanti istituzioni comunitarie come gli orti urbani. Sono pronto ad accettare le conseguenze sul piano personale; la sopravvivenza collettiva dipende dalla creazione di società che siano democratiche, economicamente eque e ecologicamente fattibili. È vergognoso che si vada a colpire chi aspira a un’attività nel settore sanitario, chi vuole diventare sociologo, storiografo, giornalista, ingegnere o insegnante più che non quelle élite incompetenti e corrotte che hanno preso in giro la nazione conducendola verso la crisi sistemica per i propri guadagni personali. La loro ipocrisia assoluta riguardo i fatti di Gaza denuncia al mondo il fallimento morale delle nostre classi di potere. Fanno leggi contro ciò che resta della libertà di esprimersi e associarsi, pregiudicando alla base l’impianto delle leggi internazionali sui diritti umani approvate per evitare proprio fatti come quelli che si stanno svolgendo in Palestina. Da parte mia avranno solo disprezzo e crediti in sofferenza. Pensate quel che volete di me, ma voglio ribellarmi contro questo sistema corrotto crudele e immorale prestando aiuto agli altri. Se ciò che riceviamo è ciò che diamo, allora noi diamo tutto.

Le nostre traduzioni sono finanziate interamente da donazioni. Se vi piace quello che scriviamo, siete invitati a contribuire. Trovate le istruzioni su come fare nella pagina Sostieni C4SS: https://c4ss.org/sostieni-c4ss.

All Landlords Are Terrible Landlords

As an object lesson in support of his thesis that “government is a terrible landlord,” Steven Greenhut (Reason, Dec. 1) recounts his experience trying to get action from his county government over complaints of a poorly maintained, overgrown vacant lot owned by the fire department. 

I started making calls to the appropriate agencies and got the usual bureaucratic runaround. I still remember my call to the weed abatement department, which assured me it would handle the situation. “Aren’t you going to take the address?” I retorted as the person was about to hang up. The county finally mowed the property after the right staffer in an elected official’s office intervened.

As further evidence that “often the biggest slumlords are government agencies,” he mentions two fires on government property — one in a former USMC blimp hangar, and one allegedly started in an underclass homeless encampment. 

(He went on to complain, incidentally, of the problem of “tent cities” on government-owned vacant lots. The primary evil of the “homeless crisis,” apparently, is that large numbers of homeless people are allowed to exist on government property without being forcibly cleared off — and not that they’re homeless because landlords had the power to evict them in the first place.) 

Greenhut concludes with the “clear” lesson: “When everyone owns something, no one does.” In support of that lesson, he links to a 35-year-old article at FEE  titled “Communal vs. Private Property Rights.”

The article is, predictably, a dumpster fire of lazy right-libertarian cliches. And, predictably, it explicitly cites Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons.” 

A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to shredding Hardin’s historically illiterate article since then — among them Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons and J. M. Neeson’s Commoners. And I suppose it’s a good sign that Greenhut merely links to an article whose central talking point comes from Hardin, perhaps hoping to endorse Hardin indirectly while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. But one does not, presumably, go all the back to the 1980s for an article to link in sole support of a comment, if their agreement is only tangential.

At any rate, the article Greenhut appeals to as an authority is utterly vacuous, starting with its thesis statement:

When the property rights to a resource are communally held, the resource is often abused. In contrast, when the rights to a resource are held by an individual or family, conservation and wise utilitization [sic] generally result.

The Hardin reference is in the context of “Cattle Grazing on the English Commons.”

In a famous 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin used the England commons to illustrate the problems of communal ownership. In the sixteenth century, many English villages had commons, or commonly held pastures, which were available to any villagers who wanted to graze their animals. Since the benefits of grazing an additional animal accrued fully to the individual, whereas the cost of overgrazing was an external one, the pastures were grazed extensively. Since the pastures were communal property, there was little incentive for an individual to conserve grass in the present so that it would be more abundant in the future. When everyone used the pasture extensively, there was not enough grass at the end of the grazing season to provide a good base for next year’s growth. Without private ownership, what was good for the individual was bad for the village as a whole.

In order to preserve the grass, pastures were fenced in the enclosure movement. After the enclosure movement established private property fights, overgrazing no longer occurred. Each owner had a strong incentive to protect the land.

The authors also mention the case of the Indigenous Montagnais people in the Labrador Peninsula.

When French fur traders came to the area in the early 1600s, the value of beaver pelts rose. The Indians hunted them more intensively and the beaver became increasingly scarce. Recognizing the depletion of the beaver population and the animal’s possible extinction, the Montagnais began to institute private property rights, as Harold Demsetz has discussed in a 1967 American Economic Review article, Each beaver-trapping area on a stream was assigned to a family, which then had both the incentive and the ability to adopt conservation practices. A family never trapped the last remaining pair of beavers in its territory, since that would harm the family the following year.

For a time, the supply of beavers was no longer in jeopardy. However, when a new wave of European trappers invaded the area, the native Americans—unable to enforce their property rights to the beaver or to their land—abandoned conservation. They took the pelts while they could. Individual ownership was destroyed, and conservation disappeared with it.

It’s hard to know where even to begin with this mountain of bullshit, but I’ll try. 

First of all, even Hardin stipulated that his “tragedy” applied only to unmanaged commons, and that managed commons could function quite effectively:

Some of the common pastures of old England were protected from ruin by the tradition of stinting — limiting each herdsman to a fixed number of animals (not necessarily the same for all). Such cases are spoken of as “managed commons,” which is the logical equivalent of socialism. Viewed this way, socialism may be good or bad, depending on the quality of the management. 

Of course this is still intellectually dishonest, insofar as it neglects to mention that managed commons were the norm. And as Neeson points out, in those cases where commons were mismanaged, it was usually because the lord of the manor, who had a disproportionate share of grazing rights in the common pasture, took advantage of his superior power in order to abuse the rules — and of course it was this same gentleman who came to the rescue and solved the “problem” by enclosing the land. As Cool Hand Luke would have said, “Wish you’d stop being so good to me, cap’n.”

As for the Montagnais, the significance of the story is just the reverse of the authors’ framing. As communal owners, they assigned beaver-trapping areas to families in exactly the same way a premodern European village would assign pasturing rights to a family, or distribute strips of land in the open fields to each household. In other words, the incident is actually an illustration of commons management.

There are plenty of other problems with right-libertarians’ fondness for Hardin. For one thing, if you want to argue that it was good for the landed classes of England to steal the commons from the peasantry because they would manage them better, how are you going to consistently condemn the Kelo decision’s identical defense of eminent domain? For another, there’s some irony in the fact that Hardin — who was both a diehard Malthusian and a racist, obsessed with the prospect of nonwhite immigrants overwhelming the carrying capacity of the land — tends to be lionized by the same folks who regularly denounce Malthusianism.

And if defenders of capitalism think communal property is bad, they’ll be shocked to learn about the modern corporation. Legally, the corporation is not the property of its shareholders, either severally or collectively. Its plant and equipment, as well as its intangible assets, are all the property of a fictitious corporate person — a collective entity, in other words. A share of common stock simply confers a set of limited and strictly defined rights, including voting rights subject to heavy regulation by a largely self-perpetuating managerial oligarchy. In other words, the corporation is every bit as collective as any common pasture in Merry Olde England. 

Getting back to Greenhut, he might put his experience with the local government bureaucracy in perspective by taking a look at what it’s like to deal with the private equity and other asset management companies that have been snapping up multi-family housing over the past couple of decades. The purchase of an apartment complex by private equity is an inevitable harbinger of rent increases, unresponsive management, decay, and neglect. Deferred maintenance and slumlord conditions are typical in apartment complexes acquired by asset-management firms. 

“We would be told for weeks on end that requests for repairs were awaiting corporate approval,” according to one resident of the Olume apartments in San Francisco after Greystar bought them out. The owners’ response to complaints of broken appliances was straight out of Brazil:

When Titus’ refrigerator and, later, her washing machine broke, she said building staff simply scavenged replacements from other apartments instead of getting the broken ones fixed or buying new ones. The shuffling was so extensive that when she had a problem with a replacement refrigerator and staff brought yet another one to her unit, she peered inside to find labels she had affixed there herself, months before. She realized staff had given her back her original appliance. It still leaked, she noted.

Greenhut gets it halfway right. The Hayekian principle that things are best managed by people in direct contact with them, with a personal interest in taking care of them, is entirely correct. But imagining that this description fits some property management company contracted out by a real estate baron, or by a private equity firm headquartered at the other end of the country, is nonsense. The lesson, if anything, is that absentee ownership as such — especially by a bureaucratic entity, whether government or corporate, whose management does its best to remain incommunicado from tenants or anyone else — is bad.

A thoroughgoing application of Hayekian principles would be, first, to undo the mass expropriation of land and forcible imposition of capitalist property rules which took place in early modern times, and restore land to the commons through such vehicles as local, democratically governed community land trusts; and, second, to convert apartments and other multi-family dwellings into self-managed cohousing.

As usual, the best deconstruction of capitalist power relations is the capitalists’ own stated principles.

 

 

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Intellectual Property: A Libertarian Critique

2nd Edition (2009, 2023)

 

Preface to Second Revised Edition (2023)

In the fourteen years since the original version of this paper was published, my political and economic views have undergone ideological shifts of the sort that might be expected of anyone who has remained intellectually engaged over a similar time period. If I were rewriting it from scratch, entire passages would no doubt be cut altogether and most of the rest would be altered significantly in terms of emphasis and likely audience, among other things.

But this is a revision, not a rewrite. Some minor stylistic changes aside, virtually all of the original text is still here in close to the original form. The major changes are all by way of addition and expansion, to include topics either that the original was deficient in addressing, or that have since emerged or increased in importance. Under the first heading is an expanded treatment of the structural role of intellectual property in the global economy; in addition, I incorporate material from Boldrin and Levine in Against Intellectual Monopoly, which I neglected to read while researching the original edition. As for the second category, this edition includes considerable new material on the role of intellectual property in enabling what is variously called “vulture capitalism,” “strip shop capitalism,” or — in Cory Doctorow’s apt term — “enshittification.”

I. The Ethics of Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is a contentious issue among libertarians. Among the individualist anarchists alone, Lysander Spooner took an absolutist position in favor of patents and copyrights, defending them as binding in perpetuity,^[1] whereas Benjamin Tucker classified them as one of his Four Monopolies.

Fourth, the patent monopoly, which consists in protecting inventors and authors against competition for a period long enough to enable them to extort from the people a reward enormously in excess of the labor measure of their services, — in other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of years in laws and facts of Nature, and the power to exact tribute from others for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all. The abolition of this monopoly would fill its beneficiaries with a wholesome fear of competition which would cause them to be satisfied with pay for their services equal to that which other laborers get for theirs, and to secure it by placing their products and works on the market at the outset at prices so low that their lines of business would be no more tempting to competitors than any other lines.^[2]

Although Tucker relegated intellectual property to last place among the Four Monopolies, he considered them entirely in terms of their effect on individual exchange, rather than their effect on industrial structure, or the structural and institutional relationships between business and the state. This problem of emphasis was a general failing of Tucker’s. After 1900, for example, when he finally began to recognize the trusts as a problem, he assumed they had grown beyond the point at which eliminating the money, landlord, and other monopolies would do any good in reining them in; he ignored entirely the great extent of their dependence, as institutions, on direct subsidies and other structural ties to the state. But in fairness to Tucker, at the time he wrote the passage quoted above the corporate transformation of the economy was just getting well underway, and the effect of intellectual property still fell primarily at the level of individual exchange.

Ayn Rand regarded patents and copyrights as “the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.”

What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’s contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property.

An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. An invention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; a story has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protects is not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, in effect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object’s value, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not be used without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mind to that which it has brought into existence.^[3]

Despite her defense of intellectual property as a property right rooted in natural law, interestingly, Rand did not pursue the principle consistently to the same logical conclusion as Spooner. Rather than treating it as a right in perpetuity comparable to tangible property rights, to devolve to one’s heirs and assigns without limits, she dismissed perpetual duration as an obvious impossibility. Instead, she considered the positive law’s provisions for copyright and patent duration as “the most rational solution….”^[4]

Perhaps the most absurd development of intellectual property absolutism was that of Andrew Galambos. As Stephan Kinsella notes, “[i]t is difficult to find published discussions of Galambos’s idea, apparently because his own theories bizarrely restrict the ability of his supporters to disseminate them”;^[5] students attending his classes were required to sign non-disclosure agreements promising not to circulate his ideas outside the circle of paying customers.^[6] Galambos reputedly dropped a nickel in a box for the heirs of Thomas Paine every time he used the word “liberty,” and juxtaposed his own first and middle names to avoid infringing on his father’s intellectual property rights in the latter’s name.^[7] If he paid royalties on the alphabet to the Tyre Chamber of Commerce, there is no record of it.

Among the Austrians, Ludwig von Mises, no anarchist, took a largely agnostic attitude toward the legitimacy of patents. As a purely utilitarian assessment of their effect, he argued that they enabled sellers to charge a monopoly price for goods that might not have been offered at all without the use of patents to recoup the cost of development.^[8]

Murray Rothbard, on the other hand, was not shy in his denunciation of patents as a fundamental violation of free market principles:

Patents prevent a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the invention, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor. Patents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the State and are invasive of property rights on the market.^[9]

Rothbard dismissed utilitarian arguments for patents, based on claims that they are socially necessary to promote innovation, with the contempt they deserved:

The most popular argument for patents among economists is the utilitarian one that a patent for a certain number of years is necessary to encourage a sufficient amount of research expenditure for inventions and innovations in processes and products.

This is a curious argument, because the question immediately arises: By what standard do you judge that research expenditures are “too much,” “too little,” or just about enough? This is a problem faced by every governmental intervention in the market’s production. Resources — the better lands, laborers, capital goods, time — in society are limited, and they may be used for countless alternative ends. By what standard does someone assert that certain uses are “excessive,” that certain uses are “insufficient,” etc.?…

Many advocates of patents believe that the ordinary competitive conditions of the market do not sufficiently encourage the adoption of new processes and that therefore innovations must be coercively promoted by the government. But the market decides on the rate of introduction of new processes just as it decides on the rate of industrialization of a new geographic area. In fact, this argument for patents is very similar to the infant-industry argument for tariffs — that market processes are not sufficient to permit the introduction of worthwhile new processes. And the answer to both these arguments is the same: that people must balance the superior productivity of the new processes against the cost of installing them, i.e., against the advantage possessed by the old process in being already built and in existence. Coercively privileging innovation would needlessly scrap valuable plants already in existence and impose an excessive burden upon consumers. For consumers’ desires would not be satisfied in the most economic manner.^[10]

This is, incidentally, the same sort of argument used for eminent domain, when property is seized for the use of a business that will be “more valuable” to the local economy.

If Rothbard rejected patents in principle, he considered copyright to be perfectly tenable and legitimate, on the assumption that it could be achieved through voluntary contract alone.

A man writes a book or composes music. When he publishes the book or sheet of music, he imprints on the first page the word “copyright.” This indicates that any man who agrees to purchase this product also agrees as part of the exchange not to recopy or reproduce this work for sale. In other words, the author does not sell his property outright to the buyer; he sells it on condition that the buyer not reproduce it for sale. Since the buyer does not buy the property outright, but only on this condition, any infringement of the contract by him or a subsequent buyer is implicit theft and would be treated accordingly on the free market. The copyright is therefore a logical device of property right on the free market.^[11]

But the sort of contractual copyright regime Rothbard envisioned would, in fact, be untenable in practice.

First, as Kinsella points out, contracts are only binding against the actual parties, so contractual copyright would be unenforceable against third parties who came into possession of copyrighted material.^[12]

Second, there are serious practical questions about the legal enforceability of contractual copyright — so-called “shrink wrap” contracts — even against the accepting party. Pseudonymous blogger “quasibill,” of The Bell Tower, writes of the serious problems the common law “meeting of the minds” requirement entails for contract enforcement in general.

As an initial matter, it is important to clarify that a contract is not a written document. For reasons that should become more apparent as you read on, the written document is nothing more than very good evidence regarding the terms of the contract. It is the agreement of the parties, or to use Anglo-American common law terminology, the “meeting of the minds” that is the actual contract. As such, the contract is a subjective creature by nature, as it requires reading the minds of at least two people.

….The words written on a document do not constitute the agreement – they are merely evidence of what the parties intended the agreement to be….

In particular, he mentions that courts generally recur to external evidence like standard market practices (“course of industry”) to ascertain subjective understanding or intent, in determining whether a “meeting of minds” took place and an enforceable contractual obligation therefore exists.^[13]

By this line of reasoning, both the seller’s and the buyer’s reasonable expectations in regard to enforceability will play a large role in determining whether the buyer did, indeed, assume contractual copyright obligations by the mere act of purchase. In an environment where verifying compliance is costly and the risks of detection and sanction are low, it is unlikely that either a buyer, or a court after the fact, will take any such contract seriously.

By way of analogy, some employers may demand, as a condition of employment, that employees not smoke even in their own homes, that they refrain from barroom discussions prejudicial to the employer’s reputation, or that they not park on company premises with a weapon concealed in the trunk. In most such cases, the employee is likely to sign an acknowledgement form and accept the job with their fingers crossed, with the mental reservation that it’s “none of the company’s damned business.” If a job application asks questions the prospective employee considers inappropriately nosy or intrusive (i.e. about political sympathies, social affiliations, and the like), they are likely to take the attitude that it’s the prospective employer’s problem to find out such things at their own effort and expense if they want to know them badly enough; they are under no obligation to incriminate themselves.

Kinsella has expressed skepticism, on similar grounds, regarding the enforceability of shrink-wrap and click-wrap contracts:

….[T]here is often no meeting of the minds on the fine print. If the customers routinely just click the “I have read and agree to these terms” box but never do read it, and the vendor knows this, then it’s a sort of fiction to assume both sides have actually agreed on these terms….^[14]

….I believe two consenting parties have the right to enter into whatever terms they want, even if they are stricter and more draconian than those set by modern IP law. …[But] I do not believe that something is part of the agreement merely because it is written down in the fine print of a click-wrap or similar type agreement; there needs to be true meeting of the minds (for example, suppose I sneak into the last clause of a long click-wrap agreement, “And the purchaser hereby agrees to give me half his income for the rest of his life.” Well, I know that you are just gonna click “yes” without reading, so I am aware that you are NOT consenting to this term, so there is no meeting of the minds; that should not be enforceable, and arguably neither should boilerplate, “unreasonable” terms in fine print that the publisher knows the customer is not even really aware of).^[15]

Third, the enforcement of contractual copyright, even if valid in law, would present enormous problems for verification of compliance. The enormous and draconian body of copyright legislation over the past twenty years should indicate that enforcement of copyright requires an intrusive regulatory and surveillance state, and that copyright is virtually unenforceable without such a mechanism.

The new digital copyright regime has done away with many traditional limitations on copyright from the days when it affected mainly the print medium, like the “first sale” and “fair use” doctrines. We can thank the traditional exceptions to copyright, for example, for the public library and for free access to photocopiers.

Charles Johnson gives, as an example of the fair use exception, the common university practice of making course reserves available for photocopying, rather than expecting every student to buy a scholarly book at the academic publishing houses’ steep rates. (I myself have numerous photocopies of books ordered through Interlibrary Loan, which would otherwise have cost me $70 or more, often for slim volumes of under two hundred pages.) But, he says,

as soon as the University eliminates the paper medium, and facilitates exactly the same thing through an non-commercial, internal University course pack website — which does nothing at all more than what the xerox packets did, except that it delivers the information to pixels on a monitor instead of toner on a page — the publishers’ racket can run to court, throw up its arms, and start hollering Computers! Internet!, send their lawyers to try to shake down have a discussion with the University administration for new tribute to their monopoly business model, and then, failing that, utterly uncontroversial decades-old practices of sharing knowledge among colleagues and students suddenly become a legal case raising core issues like the future of the business model for academic publishers, while even the most absurd protectionist arguments are dutifully repeated by legal flacks on behalf of sustaining the racket….^[16]

In the case of digital content, especially, copyright would be virtually unenforceable without not only DRM, but the criminalization of technical means for circumventing it. Imagine buying a car on the contractual understanding that you wouldn’t drive it to certain places that the dealership disapproved of. In the real world, such a contract would be a dead letter because of the high cost of verifying compliance. But if the contract were governed by the legal regime prevailing in the digital content industries, the car would be designed with built-in blocks against driving the car to forbidden places. And not only that, developing means to circumvent such blocks would be criminal acts. Doesn’t sound very libertarian, does it?

In “The Right to Read,” Richard Stallman depicted the inevitable logic of such principles, as depicted in a late 21st century society under total copyright lockdown.

…[I]f he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong — something that only pirates would do.…

Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papers he read….

Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.

There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers’ developers were sent to prison.

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.

It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers — you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer’s root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.^[17]

There’s a reason for such draconian controls. As described by Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, the corporate economy faces a growing crisis of realization, in monetizing and capturing profits from use-value created in the immaterial realm. It is becoming increasingly impossible to capture value from the ownership of ideas, designs, and technique — all the “ephemera” and “intellect” that Tom Peters writes about as a component of commodity price — leading to a crisis of sustainability for capitalism.

Recall the following: the thesis of cognitive capitalism says that we have entered a new phase of capitalism based on the accumulation of knowledge assets, rather than physical production tools. [McKenzie Wark’s] vectoralist thesis says that a new class has arisen which controls the vectors of information, i.e. the means through which information and creative products have to pass, for them to realize their exchange value. They both describe the processes of the last 40 years, say the post-1968 period, which saw a furious competition through knowledge-based competition and for the acquisition of knowledge assets, which led to the extraordinary weakening of the scientific and technical commons. And they do this rather well.

But in my opinion, both theses fail to account for the newest of the new, i.e. to take into account the emergence of peer to peer as social format. What is happening?

In terms of knowledge creation, a vast new information commons is being created, which is increasingly out of the control of cognitive capitalism.^[18]

In a later blog post for the P2P Foundation, Bauwens elaborated on the nature of cognitive capitalism as a response to the limits on accumulation in the finite physical realm, attempting a new form of accumulation based on ownership of the cognitive realm. But this attempt is doomed to fail because of the increasing untenability of property rights in the information realm. Various resource and input crises like Peak Oil, he wrote, are creating new limits to growth based on extensive expansion in the physical realm. He compares the imperative for capitalism to switch from extensive to intensive development to the parallel crisis of the chattel slave economy.

This is no trivial affair, as the failure of extensive development is what brought down earlier civilizations and modes of production. For example, slavery was not only marked by low productivity, but could not extend this productivity as that would require making the slaves more autonomous, so slave-based empires had to grow in space, but at a certain point in that growth, the cost of expansion exceeded the benefits. This is why feudalism finally emerged, a system which refocused on the local, and allowed productivity growth as serfs had a self-interest in growing and ameliorating the tools of production.

The alternative to extensive development is intensive development, as happened in the transition from slavery to feudalism. But notice that to do this, the system had to change, the core logic was no longer the same. The dream of our current economy is therefore one of intensive development, to grow in the immaterial field, and this is basically what the experience economy means. The hope that it expresses is that business can simply continue to grow in the immaterial field of experience.

However, Bauwens writes, this is not feasible. The emergence of the peer model of production, based on the non-rivalrous nature and virtually non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of digital information, and coupled with the increasing unenforceability of intellectual property laws, means that capital is incapable of realizing returns on ownership in the cognitive realm.

1. The creation of non-monetary value is exponential.
2. The monetization of such value is linear

In other words, we have a growing discrepancy between the direct creation of use value through social relationships and collective intelligence…, but only a fraction of that value can actually be captured by business and money. Innovation is becoming… an emergent property of the networks rather than an internal R & D affair within corporations; capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence….

What this announces is a crisis of value…, but also essentially a crisis of accumulation of capital. Furthermore, we lack a mechanism for the existing institutional world to re-fund what it receives from the social world. So on top of all of that, we have a crisis of social reproduction….^[19]

Corporations rely on increasingly authoritarian government legislation to capture value from proprietary information. Johann Soderberg compares the way photocopiers were monitored in the old USSR, to protect the power of elites in that country, to the way the means of digital reproduction are monitored in this country to protect corporate power.^[20]

The good news in all this is that, even with the upward ratcheting of intellectual property law and of the mandated electronic surveillance technologies for enforcing it, it is still becoming unenforceable. In an age of bittorrent, strong encryption, and proxy servers hosted in international anti-copyright havens, the DMCA is a dead letter for anyone who cares enough to take even minimal trouble to circumvent it.

A good example is the so-called “DeCSS uprising,” which followed from an attempt to suppress public discussion of means for circumventing DVD encryption.

Journalist Eric Corley — better known as Emmanuel Goldstein, a nom de plume borrowed from Orwell’s 1984 — posted the code for DeCSS (so called because it decrypts the Content Scrambling System that encrypts DVDs) as a part of a story he wrote in November for the well-known hacker journal 2600. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claims that Corley defied anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by posting the offending code….

The whole affair began when teenager Jon Johansen wrote DeCSS in order to view DVDs on a Linux machine. The MPAA has since brought suit against him in his native Norway as well. Johansen testified on Thursday that he announced the successful reverse engineering of a DVD on the mailing list of the Linux Video and DVD Project (LiViD), a user resource center for video- and DVD- related work for Linux….

The judge in the case, the honorable Lewis Kaplan of the US District Court in southern New York, issued a preliminary injunction against posting DeCSS. Corley duly took down the code, but did not help his defense by defiantly linking to myriad sites which post DeCSS….

True to their hacker beliefs, Corley supporters came to the trial wearing the DeCSS code on t-shirts. There are also over 300 Websites that still link to the decryption code, many beyond the reach of the MPAA.^[21]

This incident, and the humiliating failure of so many other corporate attempts — starting with the “McLibel” case in the UK — to suppress the free circulation of proprietary information or supposedly libelous statements,^[22] should demonstrate this beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Every such attempt, inevitably, results in the rapid transfer of files of prohibited information around the Web, and the proliferation of mirror sites, orders of magnitude faster than content owners can suppress any particular violator. The would-be corporate proprietors of information find themselves playing whack-a-mole.

And in the offensive-defensive arms race between the authoritarian surveillance technologies required to enforce proprietary content, and the circumvention technologies needed to trade such content freely, the defensive side will always be a step ahead.

If the DMCA is unenforceable even with DRM and the criminalization of technical means of circumvention, and even with taxpayer subsidy to the legal cost of enforcement, what would become of such extensive copyright claims in a free market regime? In a free market regime, where enforcement of such claims is a private good provided at cost, the payment of contractual copyright enforcement would be endogenous — i.e., the cost would be borne by the beneficiary of enforcement.

Intellectual property is a form of privilege, one example among many of the broader category of artificial property rights.

Like all forms of coercion, artificial property rights create a zero-sum situation in which one party benefits at the other’s expense. There is a symmetrical relationship between one party’s benefit and the other’s loss. While natural property rights benefit everyone by securing the individual’s claim to the product of their own effort, artificial property rights enable the holder to collect tribute from the efforts of others. Natural property rights are a way of dealing with scarcity; artificial property rights create scarcity.

The distinction between natural and artificial property rights is analogous to that of Albert Jay Nock between “labor-made” and “law-made” property.^[23] Were it not for legal appropriation of the land, Nock argued — i.e., the engrossment of vacant and unimproved land to a favored class which did not appropriate it by its own labor, but was enabled to collect tribute from those who did — economic exploitation would be impossible. Historically, so long as wage employers have to compete with easy access to self-employment, there is a floor under the wages people are willing to work for and a ceiling on the rate of profit. As Kropotkin asked:

If every peasant-farmer had a piece of land, free from rent and taxes, if he had in addition the tools and the stock necessary for farm labour — Who would plough the lands of the baron? Everyone would look after his own….

If all the men and women in the countryside had their daily bread assured, and their daily needs already satisfied, who would work for our capitalist at a wage of half a crown a day, while the commodities one produces in a day sell in the market for a crown or more?^[24]

Defenders of intellectual property argue that the innovator deserves the scarcity rents, as a reward for the net contribution to consumers’ utility. If the consumer does not consider the innovation a benefit even at the patented price, they are free not to buy it. Reason magazine’s Ronald Bailey, an enthusiastic supporter of the drug and biotech industries, is a good example of this line of argument. Citing a study that compared the overall economic value to consumers from increased life expectancy to the cost paid for drugs, he argued (in the words of his title) that “drug companies don’t get enough money… for the life-saving benefits they give us….”^[25]

But there’s a word for someone who’s able to target the pricing of a good according to the consumer’s benefit from it: a monopolist. The normal effect of market competition is for the productivity benefits of new technology to translate directly into lower consumer prices. It is only through artificial property rights that privileged sellers can charge the consumer in proportion to their increased utility and ability to pay, regardless of the cost of supplying the good. The term for that practice is “price discrimination”; in the words of Michele Boldrin and David Levine, “competitors charge the same price to everyone, but monopolies try to extract a higher price from those who value the product more highly.”^[26]

The pricing policy of Boulton and Watt’s enterprise was a classical example of monopoly pricing: over and above the cost of the materials needed to build the steam engine, they would charge royalties equal to one-third of the fuel cost-savings attained by their engine in comparison to the Newcomen engine…. It allows for price discrimination because, given the transport technology of the time, the price of coal – and horses, the alternative to the Newcomen engine being horses – varied substantially from one region to another.^[27]

Patents impede the normal process of market competition by which technological innovation translates directly into lower consumer cost. They enable the privileged to appropriate productivity gains for themselves, rather than allowing their benefits to be socialized through market competition.

But they do more than that: they make it possible to collect tribute for the “service” of not obstructing production. As John R. Commons observed, the alleged “service” performed by the holder of artificial property rights, in “contributing” some “factor” to production, is defined entirely by his ability to obstruct access to it. As I wrote in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, marginalist economics

treated the existing structure of property rights over “factors” as a given, and proceeded to show how the product would be distributed among these “factors” according to their marginal contribution. By this method, if slavery were still extant, a marginalist might with a straight face write of the marginal contribution of the slave to the product (imputed, of course, to the slave­ owner), and of the “opportunity cost” involved in committing the slave to one or another use.^[28]

Such privileges, Maurice Dobb argued, were analogous to a state grant of authority to collect tolls, (much like the medieval robber barons who obstructed commerce between their petty principalities):

Suppose that toll­gates were a general institution, rooted in custom or ancient legal right. Could it reasonably be denied that there would be an important sense in which the income of the toll ­owning class represented “an appropriation of goods produced by others” and not payment for an “activity directed to the production or transformation of economic goods?” Yet toll­ charges would be fixed in competition with alternative roadways, and hence would, presumably, represent prices fixed “in an open market….” Would not the opening and shutting of toll­gates become an essential factor of production, according to most current definitions of a factor of production, with as much reason at any rate as many of the functions of the capitalist entrepreneur are so classed to­day? This factor, like others, could then be said to have a “marginal productivity” and its price be regarded as the measure and equivalent of the service it rendered. At any rate, where is a logical line to be drawn between toll­gates and property ­rights over scarce resources in general?^[29]

Thorstein Veblen made a similar distinction between property as capitalized serviceability, versus capitalized disserviceability. The latter consisted of power advantages over rivals and the public which enabled owners to obstruct production.^[30]

It is sometimes argued, in response to attacks on patents as monopolies, that “all property is a monopoly.” True, as far as it goes; but tangible property based on possession is a monopoly by the nature of the case. A parcel of land can only be occupied and used by one owner at a time, because it is finite. By nature, two people cannot occupy the same physical space at the same time. Intellectual property, in contrast, is an artificial monopoly where scarcity would not otherwise exist. And unlike property in tangible goods and land, the defense of which is a necessary outgrowth of the attempt to maintain possession, enforcement of property rights in ideas requires the invasion of someone else’s space. “Patents… invade rather than defend property rights.”^[31]

Kinsella describes the way that intellectual property rights give the holder a right in other people’s tangible property. An intellectual property right implies that

“A person who comes up with some useful or creative idea which can guide or direct an actor in the use of his own tangible property thereby instantly gains a right to control all other tangible property in the world, with respect to that property’s similar use.” This new-fangled homesteading technique is so powerful that it gives the creator rights in third parties’ already owned tangible property.

For example, by inventing a new technique for digging a well, the inventor can prevent all others in the world from digging wells in this manner, even on their own property. To take another example, imagine the time when men lived in caves. One bright guy — let’s call him Galt­Magnon — decides to build a log cabin on an open field, near his crops. To be sure, this is a good idea, and others notice it. They naturally imitate Galt­Magnon, and they start building their own cabins. But the first man to invent a house, according to IP advocates, would have a right to prevent others from building houses on their own land, with their own logs, or to charge them a fee if they do build houses. It is plain that the innovator in these examples becomes a partial owner of the tangible property (e.g., land and logs) of others, due not to first occupation and use of that property (for it is already owned), but due to his coming up with an idea.^[32]

Dilbert creator Scott Adams, in a rather feeble attempt to defend copyright, used the analogy of underpants:

Let me give you an analogy. Let’s say your neighbor sneaks into your house while you are gone and borrows your underpants. After wearing your underpants all day, the neighbor launders them, folds them neatly, and returns them to your house in perfect condition, all while you are gone. He tells himself that he will say good things to people about your business — whatever business that is — so this arrangement is good publicity for you. The next time he sees you, he tells you about the underpants because he figures you’ll thank him for saying nice things about his business. He informs you that it’s a win-win scenario.

Given that you have full use of your property (the underpants), is it a victimless crime? I would say the owner of the underpants lost something even though his property is physically the same.^[33]

This is a remarkably poor analogy. Underpants are a physical object that can only be in one place at a time. When the neighbor borrows my underpants, I no longer have that particular pair in my possession any more. Their use of them logically precludes my being able to use them. Physical property is a zero-sum game, in which one person’s possession necessarily comes at the expense of everyone else’s possession. That is exactly why property rights are a logical conflict avoidance mechanism for physical property: given the fact that a physical object can only be possessed by one person at a time, property rules establish who the rightful owner is and prevent conflict between multiple claimants trying to possess the same thing at the same time.

A more accurate analogy would be to suppose that I could cause an exact duplicate of Adams’ underpants, created from atoms in my own house, to appear in my own underwear drawer entirely through publicly available knowledge of the configuration of atoms in the original pair, without ever trespassing in Adams’ home or disturbing his particular pair of underpants in any way.

Adams’ real objection, obviously, is not to the deprivation of the thing itself or its use in any sense, but to loss of the economic value of artistic creations that would result from his sole legal right to sell them. But as Kinsella argues, “one cannot have a right to the value of one’s property, but only in its physical integrity.”^[34] One cannot argue otherwise without accepting the premises of local zoning laws and assorted aesthetic ordinances (against outbuildings, compost piles, clotheslines, solar panels, front yard gardens, cars parked on lawns, etc.,) designed to protect homeowners from a decline in their “property values.” One’s primary right in a possession is its unfettered use, not to cooperation by others in the maintenance of its resale value. A law that restrains one’s use and enjoyment of actual possession in one’s own property, in order to maintain the market value of someone else’s — and all in the name of property rights, no less — is fundamentally perverse.

Blogger Mark Poncelet, incidentally, came up with a hilarious parody of Adams’ underpants analogy:

Let’s not forget that you never actually own your underpants (unless you crochet them yourself. Just be very careful that you don’t make a pair that looks like someone else’s. You could be liable for damages). Most underpants makers only give you a license to wear them. When you “buy” these underpants, some of that money goes to the person who designed them. The rest goes to the company that mass-­produced them and the company that shipped them. Some of that money finds its way to entities who are preparing to sue you for wearing your underpants improperly.

I pay a subscription fee to a company that sends me underpants on demand. I can wear them, but they get to choose how often I wear them, and I can’t wear similar underpants too many times in a row. When I’m done, I have to send the underpants back. This is a whole lot better than some other methods of getting underpants….

Buy your underpants from iTunes? At least you get to keep them! Yet be prepared to have someone from Apple watch you put them on and take them off….

Regardless of how you get your underpants, there are some brutal realities to consider before you put them on. Like I mentioned above, you don’t own these underpants. Someone else does. They’re just giving you permission to wear them. In return for this permission, they get to decide a lot.^[35]

II. Privilege as Economic Irrationality

Artificial property rights create irrationality by holding productive resources out of use and creating maldistribution of purchasing power.

In the 1830s Thomas Hodgskin, writing in The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, noted the effect of artificial property in land in holding productive land out of use and denying opportunities to labor. When land is made artificially scarce to labor by political appropriation of land, and land owners are able to hold vacant and unimproved land out of use, the landlord will not allow it to come into use unless it is productive enough to support not only the laborer but also the rentier. Projects like the draining of marshes and cultivation of waste land which, if homesteading were free, would have amply repaid the laborer for their own labor, were not undertaken because labor sufficient to support the laborer and their family in comfort could not “obtain from them a sufficiency to pay profit, tithes, rent, and taxes.”^[36]

Likewise, intellectual property enables the owner to hold productive techniques out of use unless the would-be user is able to use them productively enough to provide an acceptable return to the patent or copyright holder, in addition to themselves.

And as we shall see below, intellectual property is responsible for a phenomenon Tom Peters celebrated: the growing portion of the price of goods comprised of “intellect” and “ephemera.” This is part of a larger phenomenon, by which artificial scarcities, rents on artificial property rights, and the inflated overhead costs imposed by those things and by other licensing and regulatory schemes, together erect barriers between effort and subsistence.

By simultaneously increasing the threshold of labor required for comfortable subsistence, and enabling the owners of artificial property rights to derive unearned rentier incomes unrelated to any legitimate effort, intellectual property divorces effort from consumption and creates a maldistribution of purchasing power. To cite Hodgskin again:

The wants of individuals which labour is intended to gratify, are the natural guide to their exertions. The instant they are compelled to labour for others, this guide forsakes them, and their exertions are dictated by the greed and avarice, and false hopes of their masters. The wants springing from our organization, and accompanying the power to labour, being created by the same hand which creates and fashions the whole universe, including the course of the seasons, and what the earth brings forth, it is fair to suppose that they would at all times guide the exertions of the labourer, so as fully to ensure a supply of necessaries and conveniences, and nothing more. They have, as it were, a prototype in nature, agreeing with other phenomena, but the avarice and greed of masters have no such prototype…. By this system the hand is dissevered from the mouth, and labour is put in motion to gratify vanity and ambition, not the natural wants of animal existence. When we look at the commercial history of our country, and see the false hopes of our merchants and manufacturers leading to periodical commercial convulsions, we are compelled to conclude, that they have not the same source as the regular and harmonious external world.^[37]

Because of the centrality of economic rents on artificial property rights and artificial scarcity to capitalist profit, capitalism is inherently prone to chronic crisis tendencies of overproduction, underconsumption, and idle capital without a profitable outlet.

III.  IP and the Structure of the American Domestic Economy

In American industrial history, the control, exchange and pooling of patents was a central mechanism for cartelizing industry within stable oligopoly markets.

According to David Noble, two essentially new science-based industries (those that “grew out of the soil of scientific rather than traditional craft knowledge”) emerged in the late 19th century: the electrical and chemical industries.^[38] They were also the two industries most central to what Lewis Mumford called the neotechnic stage of technological history.^[39]

In the electric industry, General Electric had its origins first in a merger between Edison Electric (which controlled all of Edison’s electrical patents) and the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company, and then in an 1892 merger between Edison General Electric and Thomas-Houston — both of them motivated primarily by patent considerations. In the latter case, in particular, Edison General Electric and Thomas-Houston each needed patents owned by the others and could not “develop lighting, railway or power equipment without fear of infringement suits and injunctions.”^[40] From the 1890s on, the electrical industry was dominated by two large firms: GE and Westinghouse, both of which owed their market shares largely to patent control. In addition to the patents which they originally owned, they acquired control over patents (and hence over much of the electrical manufacturing market) through “acquisition of the patent rights of individual inventors, acquisition of competing firms, mergers with competitors, and the systematic and strategic development of their own patentable inventions. As GE and Westinghouse together secured a deadlock on the electrical industry through patent acquisition, competition between them became increasingly intense and disruptive. By 1896 the litigation cost from some three hundred pending patent suits was enormous, and the two companies agreed to form a joint Board of Patent Control. General Electric and Westinghouse pooled their patents, with GE handling 62.5% of the combined business.^[41]

The structure of the telephone industry had similar origins, with the Bell Patent Association forming “the nucleus of the first Bell industrial organization” (and eventually of AT&T) The National Bell Telephone Company, from the 1880s on, fought vigorously to “occupy the field” (in the words of general manager Theodore N. Vail) through patent control. As Vail described the process, the company surrounded itself

with everything that would protect the business, that is the knowledge of the business, all the auxiliary apparatus; a thousand and one little patents and inventions with which to do the business which was necessary, that is what we wanted to control and get possession of.

To achieve this, the company early on established an engineering department “whose business it was”

to study the patents, study the development and study these devices that either were originated by our own people or came in to us from the outside. Then early in 1879 we started our patent department, whose business was entirely to study the question of patents that came out with a view to acquiring them, because… we recognized that if we did not control these devices, somebody else would.^[42]

This approach strengthened the company’s position of control over the market not only during the seventeen year period of the main patents, but (as Frederick Fish put it in an address to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers) during the subsequent seventeen years of

each and every one of the patents taken out on subsidiary methods and devices invented during the progress of commercial development. [Therefore] one of the first steps taken was to organize a corps of inventive engineers to perfect and improve the telephone system in all directions …that by securing accessory inventions, possession of the field might be retained as far as possible and for as long a time as possible.^[43]

This method, preemptive occupation of the market through strategic patent acquisition and control, was also used by GE and Westinghouse.

Even with the intensified competition resulting from the expiration of the original Bell patents in 1894, and before government favoritism in the grants of rights-of-way and regulated monopoly status, the legacy effect of AT&T’s control of the secondary patents was sufficient to secure them half the telephone market thirteen years later, in 1907.^[44] AT&T, anticipating the expiration of its original patents, had (to quote Vail again) “surrounded the business with all the auxiliary protection that was possible.” For example, the company in 1900 purchased Michael Pupin’s patent on loading coils and in 1907 acquired exclusive domestic rights for Cooper-Hewitt’s patents on the mercury-arc repeater — essential technologies underlying AT&T’s monopoly on long-distance telephony.^[45]

By the time the FCC was formed in 1935, the Bell System had acquired patents to “some of the most important inventions in telephony and radio,” and “through various radio-patent pool agreements in the 1920s… had effectively consolidated its position relative to the other giants in the industry.” In so doing, according to an FCC investigation, AT&T had gained control of “the exploitation of potentially competitive and emerging forms of communication” and “pre-empt[ed] for itself new frontiers of technology for exploitation in the future….”^[46]

The radio-patent pools included AT&T, GE and Westinghouse, RCA (itself formed as a subsidiary of GE after the latter acquired American Marconi), and American Marconi.^[47] Alfred Chandler’s history of the origins of the consumer electronics industry is little more than an extended account of which patents were held, and subsequently acquired, by which companies. In an age where the required capital outlays for actual physical plant and equipment are rapidly diminishing in many forms of manufacturing, one of the chief functions of intellectual property is to create artificial “comparative advantage” by giving a particular firm a monopoly on technologies and techniques, and prevent their diffusion throughout the market.

The American chemical industry, in its modern form, was made possible by the Justice Department’s seizure of German chemical patents in WWI. Until the war, some 98% of patent applications in chemical industry came from German firms, and were never worked in the U.S. As a result the American chemical industry was technically second-rate, largely limited to final processing of intermediate goods imported from Germany. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, as “Alien Property Custodian” during the war, held the patents in trust and licensed 735 of them to American firms; Du Pont alone received three hundred.^[48]

The use of patents as a tool for cartelizing markets was by no means limited to the electrical and chemical industries. They were used in the automobile and steel industries among others, according to Noble.^[49] In a 1906 article, mechanical engineer and patent lawyer Edwin Prindle described patents as “the best and most effective means of controlling competition.”

Patents are the only legal form of absolute monopoly. In a recent court decision the court said, “within his domain, the patentee is czar…. cries of restraint of trade and impairment of the freedom of sales are unavailing, because for the promotion of the useful arts the constitution and statutes authorize this very monopoly.”

The power which a patentee has to dictate the conditions under which his monopoly may be exercised has been used to form trade agreements throughout practically entire industries, and if the purpose of the combination is primarily to secure benefit from the patent monopoly, the combination is legitimate. Under such combinations there can be effective agreements as to prices to be maintained…; the output for each member of the combination can be specified and enforced… and many other benefits which were sought to be secured by trade combinations made by simple agreements can be added. Such trade combinations under patents are the only valid and enforceable trade combinations that can be made in the United States.^[50]

And unlike purely private cartels, which are threatened by defection and instability, patent control cartels — being based on a state-granted privilege — carry a credible and effective punishment for defection.

Through their “Napoleonic concept of industrial warfare, with inventions and patents as the soldiers of fortune,” and through “the research arm of the ‘patent offensive,’” manufacturing corporations were able to secure stable control of markets in their respective industries.^[51]

Today, intellectual property serves as a structural support for corporate boundaries in many industries in which technological advance has undermined the control of physical capital as their primary basis. The growing importance of human capital, and the implosion of capital outlay costs required to enter the market, have had revolutionary implications for production in the immaterial sphere.

In the old days, the immense value of physical assets was the primary basis for the corporate hierarchy’s power, and in particular for its control over human capital and other intangible assets.

As Luigi Zingales observes, the declining importance of physical assets relative to human capital has changed this. Physical assets, “which used to be the major source of rents, have become less unique and are not commanding large rents anymore.” And “the demand for process innovation and quality improvement… can only be generated by talented employees,” which increases the importance of human capital.^[52] This is even more true since Zingales wrote, with the rise of the organizational models variously known as the Wikified firm, the hyperlinked organization, Enterprise 2.0, etc.

Tom Peters remarked in quite similar language, some six years earlier in The Tom Peters Seminar, on the changing balance of physical and human capital. Of Inc. magazine’s 500 top-growth companies, which include a good number of information, computer technology, and biotech firms, 34% were launched on initial capital of less than $10,000, 59% on less than $50,000, and 75% on less than $100,000.^[53]

In many industries, the initial outlay for entering the market was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. For instance the old electronic mass media, according to Yochai Benkler, were “typified by high-cost hubs and cheap, ubiquitous, reception-only systems at the end. This led to a limited range of organizational models for production: those that could collect sufficient funds to set up a hub.”^[54] The same was true of print periodicals, with the increasing cost of printing equipment from the mid-nineteenth century on serving as the main entry barrier for organizing the hubs. Between 1835 and 1850, the typical startup cost of a newspaper increased from $500 to $100,000 — or from roughly $10,000 to $2.38 million in 2005 dollars.^[55]

The networked information economy, in contrast, is distinguished by “network architecture and the [low] cost of becoming a speaker.”

The first element is the shift from a hub-and-spoke architecture with unidirectional links to the end points in the mass media, to distributed architecture with multidirectional connections among all nodes in the networked information environment. The second is the practical elimination of communications costs as a barrier to speaking across associational boundaries. Together, these characteristics have fundamentally altered the capacity of individuals, acting alone or with others, to be active participants in the public sphere as opposed to its passive readers, listeners, or viewers.^[56]

The central change that makes this possible is that “the basic physical capital necessary to express and communicate human meaning is the connected personal computer.”

The core functionalities of processing, storage, and communications are widely owned throughout the population of users…. The high capital costs that were a prerequisite to gathering, working, and communicating information, knowledge, and culture, have now been widely distributed in the society. The entry barrier they posed no longer offers a condensation point for the large organizations that once dominated the information environment.^[57]

The desktop revolution and the Internet mean that the minimum capital outlay for entering most of the entertainment and information industry has fallen to a few thousand dollars, and the marginal cost of reproduction is zero. If anything that overstates the cost of entry in many cases, considering how rapidly computer value depreciates and the relatively miniscule cost of buying a five-year-old computer and adding memory. The networked environment, combined with endless varieties of cheap software for creating and editing content, makes it possible for the amateur to produce output of a quality once associated with giant publishing houses and recording companies.^[58] That is true of the software industry, the music industry (thanks to cheap equipment and software for high quality recording and sound editing), desktop publishing, and to a certain extent even to film (as witnessed by affordable editing technology and the success of Sky Captain). Podcasting makes it possible to distribute “radio” and “television” programming, at virtually no cost, to anyone with a broadband connection. A network of amateur contributors have peer-produced an encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which Britannica sees as a rival. As Tom Coates put it, “the gap between what can be accomplished at home and what can be accomplished in a work environment has narrowed dramatically over the last ten to fifteen years.”^[59]

It’s also true of news, with ever-expanding networks of amateurs in venues like Indymedia, alternative new operations like Robert Parry’s and Greg Palast’s, and natives and American troops blogging news firsthand from Iraq, at the very same time the traditional broadcasting networks are shutting down.

This has profoundly weakened corporate hierarchies in the information and entertainment industries, and created enormous agency problems as well. As the value of human capital increases, and the cost of physical capital investments needed for independent production by human capital decreases, the power of corporate hierarchies becomes less and less relevant. As the value of human relative to physical capital increases, the entry barriers become progressively lower for workers to take their human capital outside the firm and start new firms under their own control. Zingales gives the example of the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising agency. The largest block of shareholders, U.S. fund managers who controlled 30% of stock, thought that gave them effective control of the firm. They attempted to exercise this perceived control by voting down Maurice Saatchi’s proposed increased option package for himself. In response, the Saatchi brothers took their human capital (in actuality the lion’s share of the firm’s value) elsewhere to start a new firm, and left a hollow shell owned by the shareholders.^[60]

Interestingly, in 1994 a firm like Saatchi and Saatchi, with few physical assets and a lot of human capital, could have been considered an exception. Not any more. The wave of initial public offerings of purely human capital firms, such as consultant firms, and even technology firms whose main assets are the key employees, is changing the very nature of the firm. Employees are not merely automata in charge of operating valuable assets but valuable assets themselves, operating with commodity-like physical assets.^[61]

In another, similar example, the former head of Salomon Brothers’ bond trading group formed a new group with former Salomon traders responsible for 87% of the firm’s profits.

…if we take the standpoint that the boundary of the firm is the point up to which top management has the ability to exercise power…, the group was not an integral part of Salomon. It merely rented space, Salomon’s name, and capital, and turned over some share of its profits as rent.^[62]

Marjorie Kelly gave the breakup of the Chiat/Day ad agency, in 1995, as an example of the same phenomenon.

…What is a corporation worth without its employees?

This question was acted out… in London, with the revolutionary birth of St. Luke’s ad agency, which was formerly the London office of Chiat/Day. In 1995, the owners of Chiat/Day decided to sell the company to Omnicon — which meant layoffs were looming and Andy Law in the London office wanted none of it. He and his fellow employees decided to rebel. They phoned clients and found them happy to join the rebellion. And so at one blow, London employees and clients were leaving.

Thus arose a fascinating question: What exactly did the “owners” of the London office now own? A few desks and files? Without employees and clients, what was the London branch worth? One dollar, it turned out. That was the purchase price — plus a percentage of profits for seven years — when Omnicon sold the London branch to Law and his cohorts after the merger. They renamed it St. Luke’s…. All employees became equal owners… Every year now the company is re-valued, with new shares awarded equally to all.^[63]

David Prychitko remarked on “break-away firms” in the tech industry as far back as 1991:

Old firms act as embryos for new firms. If a worker or group of workers is not satisfied with the existing firm, each has a skill which he or she controls, and can leave the firm with those skills and establish a new one. In the information age it is becoming more evident that a boss cannot control the workers as one did in the days when the assembly line was dominant. People cannot be treated as workhorses any longer, for the value of the production process is becoming increasingly embodied in the intellectual skills of the worker. This poses a new threat to the traditional firm if it denies participatory organization.

The appearance of break-away computer firms leads one to question the extent to which our existing system of property rights in ideas and information actually protects bosses in other industries against the countervailing power of workers. Perhaps our current system of patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property rights not only impedes competition and fosters monopoly, as some Austrians argue. Intellectual property rights may also reduce the likelihood of break-away firms in general, and discourage the shift to more participatory, cooperative formats.^[64]

In this environment, the only thing standing between the old information and media dinosaurs and their total collapse is their intellectual property rights — at least to the extent they’re still enforceable. Ownership of intellectual property becomes the new basis for the power of institutional hierarchies, and the primary structural bulwark for corporate boundaries. Even corporate apologists like Bill Gates and Tom Peters celebrate the network revolution and flattening of hierarchies: they just favor domesticating the process within a corporate framework enforced by ownership of intellectual property. But the networked designers within Microsoft are doing essentially the same thing that teams of Linux programmers are doing outside the corporate walls. Intellectual property is the only thing that prevents the walls from dissolving, and the Microsoft programmers becoming part of a larger environment of loose peer design networks, with the firm replaced by self-organized, project-based teams — with teams constantly gaining members from and losing them to other teams, projects discontinuing or forking, etc., on the Linux model.

Without intellectual property, in any industry where the basic production equipment is affordable to all, and bottom-up networking renders management obsolete, it is likely that self-managed, cooperative production will replace the old managerial hierarchies. The network revolution, if its full potential is realized,

will lead to substantial redistribution of power and money from the twentieth century industrial producers of information, culture, and communications — like Hollywood, the recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications giants — to a combination of widely diffuse populations around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made.”^[65]

Against this background of radical cheapening of the equipment needed for actual production and distribution in the information and entertainment industries, the primary function of intellectual property is to protect the viability of institutions for whose existence there is no purely technical need. Copyright exists, not so that “creators will be paid” — they would be paid more by cutting out the content industry’s corporate middlemen — but so that record company managers and shareholders will be paid.

With modern Internet distribution and laptop computer “recording studios,” the cost of producing music is quite low. So, the allegedly large fixed cost to be recouped via monopoly profits is not due to the actual economic cost of producing and distributing the music, which modern technology has cut to a fraction of what it used to be. The large fixed cost that needs to be recouped via monopoly profits seems to be due to the very existence of the system of copyright and the large monopolies thriving on it. From there come the legal, agency, and marketing costs contemporary monopolized music faces, and passes on to consumers.^[66]

Another effect of the shift in importance from tangible to intangible assets is that a growing portion of product prices consists of embedded rents on intellectual property and other artificial property rights rather than the material costs of production. Tom Peters cited former 3M strategic planner George Hegg on the increasing portion of product “value” made up of intellectual property (i.e., the amount of final price consisting of tribute to the owners of intellectual property): “We are trying to sell more and more intellect and less and less materials.” Peters produces a long string of such examples:

My new Minolta 9xi is a lumpy object, but I suspect I paid about $10 for its plastic casing, another $50 for the fine-ground optical glass, and the rest, about $640, for its intellect…^[67]

It is a soft world…. Nike contracts for the production of its spiffy footwear in factories around the globe, but it creates the enormous stock value via superb design and, above all, marketing skills. Tom Silverman, founder of upstart Tommy Boy Records, says Nike was the first company to understand that it was in the lifestyle business…. Shoes? Lumps? Forget it! Lifestyle. Image. Speed. Value via intellect and pizazz.^[68]

“Microsoft’s only factory asset is the human imagination,” observed The New York Times Magazine writer Fred Moody. In seminars I’ve used the slide on which those words appear at least a hundred times, yet every time that simple sentence comes into view on the screen I feel the hairs on the back of my neck bristle.^[69]

A few years back, Philip Morris purchased Kraft for $12.9 billion, a fair price in view of its subsequent performance. When the accountants finished their work, it turned out that Philip Morris had bought $1.3 billion worth of “stuff” (tangible assets) and $11.6 billion of “Other.” What’s the other, the 116/129?

…. Call it intangibles, good-will (the U.S. accountants’ term), brand equity, or the ideas in the heads of thousands of Kraft employees around the world.^[70]

Regarding Peters’ Minolta example, as Benkler points out the marginal cost of reproducing “its intellect” is virtually zero. So about 90% of the price of that new Minolta comes from tolls to corporate gatekeepers, who have been granted control of that “intellect.” In an economy where software and product design were the product of peer networks, unrestricted by the intellectual property of old corporate dinosaurs, 90% of the product’s price would evaporate overnight. To quote Michael Perelman,

the so-called weightless economy has more to do with the legislated powers of intellectual property that the government granted to powerful corporations. For example, companies such as Nike, Microsoft, and Pfizer sell stuff that has high value relative to its weight only because their intellectual property rights insulate them from competition.^[71]

The same goes for Nike’s sneakers. I suspect the amortization cost of the physical capital used to manufacture the shoes in those Asian sweatshops, plus the cost of the sweatshop labor, is less than 10% of the price of the shoes. The wages of the workers could be tripled or quadrupled with negligible impact on the retail price.

How many extra hours does the average person work each week to pay tribute to the owners of the “human imagination”?

The good news is that, as intellectual property becomes increasingly unenforceable, we can expect two things: first, for the ownership of proprietary content to become untenable as a basis for corporate institutional power; and second, for the portion of commodity price reflecting embedded rents on artificial property rights to implode.

Intellectual property also serves as a bulwark to planned obsolescence and high-overhead production. It’s an example of a general law stated by Thomas Hodgskin: Social regulations and commercial prohibitions “compel us to employ more labour than is necessary to obtain the prohibited commodity,” or “to give a greater quantity of labour to obtain it than nature requires,” and put the difference into the pockets of privileged classes.^[72]

Note well: every single expedient resorted to by corporate enterprise, in order to overcome the abundance created by technological progress and maintain the profit model, entails the deliberate imposition of inefficiency of some sort. Intellectual property, non-compete clauses in employment contracts, the offense which we will examine later of “felony contempt of business model” — all are ways of deliberately impeding the transfer of human capital, knowledge, and technique, in order to make them artificially scarce and costly, resulting in a radically inflated cost of making or doing anything.

IV. Intellectual Property and the Global Economy

Along with legal title to colonially looted and enclosed land and natural resources, intellectual property is the legal instrument by which a few hundred transnational corporations are able to manage global “trade” — most of which is not trade at all, but the internal shuffling of unfinished and finished goods within corporate logistic chains, whether between direct subsidiaries or nominally independent contractors enclosed within corporate legal walls. Although right-libertarian polemicists still sing the praises of “free trade” and Ricardian “comparative advantage,” anything resembling actual international trade — in the sense of business firms owned in one country exporting goods to another country — has at best been a secondary phenomenon in the global economy for decades.

In the information and content industries, Michael Perelman argues that the upsurge in intellectual property protection since the late 1960s has been an integral part of the neoliberal revolution.

Although many old line industries could no longer compete effectively in world markets, exports of intellectual property in the form of royalties and copyright fees soared.

I have not seen hard data regarding the effect of intellectual property rights on the rate of profit, but I am convinced that it is substantial. Just think about Microsoft and the pharmaceutical industry with their low marginal costs relative to their market prices. For example, Microsoft reported that it makes 85 percent margin on its Windows system….^[73]

Elsewhere he cites figures showing that revenues on intellectual property rose, between 1947 and the early 1990s, from ten percent to over half of all American exports. In 1999 export revenues from royalties and licensing revenue reached $37 billion, exceeding the revenue from aircraft export ($29 billion).^[74]

It’s hardly coincidental that the dominant industrial sectors in the global corporate economy are all heavily dependent on intellectual property: software, entertainment, biotech, pharmaceuticals, and electronics. And the central focus of the neoliberal “free trade” regime is on promoting a draconian, maximalist intellectual property agenda.

Even more important than its role in the information industries, arguably, is the role of intellectual property in enclosing physical production and trade within global corporate legal walls. Intellectual property is the primary legal bulwark of corporate globalization, and plays the same protectionist role for transnational corporations that tariffs did for the old industrial corporations a century ago.

Patents are used on a global scale to lock transnational manufacturing corporations into a permanent monopoly on ownership of productive technology and the right to license it. This is the function, in particular, of the industrial property provisions in the Uruguay Round of GATT.^[75] The developed world has pushed particularly hard to protect industries relying on or producing “generic technologies,” and to restrict diffusion of “dual use” technologies. The U. S.-Japanese trade agreement on semiconductors, for example, is a “cartel-like, ‘managed trade’ agreement.” So much for “free trade.”^[76]

The GATT intellectual property regime aims to permanently lock in the collective monopoly of advanced technology by TNCs, and prevent independent competition from ever arising in the Third World. It would, as Martin Khor Kok Peng writes, “effectively prevent the diffusion of technology to the Third World, and would tremendously increase monopoly royalties of the TNCs whilst curbing the potential development of Third World technology.”^[77]

Raghavan summed up nicely the effect on the Third World: “Given the vast outlays in R and D and investments, as well as the short life cycle of some of these products,”

the leading Industrial Nations are trying to prevent emergence of competition by controlling… the flows of technology to others. The Uruguay round is being sought to be used to create export monopolies for the products of Industrial Nations, and block or slow down the rise of competitive rivals, particularly in the newly industrializing Third World countries. At the same time the technologies of senescent industries of the north are sought to be exported to the South under conditions of assured rentier income.^[78]

Intellectual property not only restricts the diffusion of production technology, but also ensures that when that production technology does pass into the hands of local producers the transnational corporations can still control the ways in which those producers are allowed to use the technology through intellectual property in the goods produced themselves.

The neoliberal model of the past forty years has been to outsource increasing shares of actual production to nominally independent contractors in low-wage countries of the Global South, while using intellectual property, marketing and finance to enforce a legal monopoly on disposal of the finished product and integrate networked logistic chains under corporate control.

This is the so-called Nike model Naomi Klein describes in No Logo. She quotes John Ermatinger, then head of Levi Strauss’s American division:

Our strategic plan in North America is to focus intensely on brand management, marketing and product design as a means to meet the casual clothing wants and needs of consumers. Shifting a significant portion of our manufacturing from the U.S. and Canadian markets to contractors throughout the world will give the company greater flexibility to allocate resources and capital to its brands.^[79]

A growing share of companies, according to Klein, “now bypass production completely.”

Instead of making the products themselves, in their own factories, they “source” them, much as corporations in the natural-resource industries source uranium, copper or logs. They close existing factories, shifting to contracted-out, mostly offshore, manufacturing.^[80]

Nike “has become a prototype for the product-free brand,” with many other companies following its lead in outsourcing all actual production.^[81]

Job flight is commonly framed in American politics as companies “moving production/jobs overseas,” but that’s really not accurate.

Unlike factories that hop from one place to another, these factories will never rematerialize. Mid-flight, they morph into something else entirely: “orders” to be placed with a contractor, who may well turn over those orders to as many as ten subcontractors, who — particularly in the garment sector — may in turn pass a portion of the subcontracts on to a network of home workers who will complete the jobs in basements and living rooms.^[82]

Advances in technology are making the actual means of physical production increasingly cheap and ephemeral — a state of affairs which threatens the traditional basis of profit. The original rationale for large-scale factory production and the wage system was the rising cost of machinery. According to John Curl, a historian of worker cooperatives, cooperative production was only viable so long as the primary means of production were general-purpose craft tools owned by individual workers. That was the basis of cooperative production as organized by Owenites in the early- to mid-19th century, when unemployed workers set up cooperative shops using their own tools under a common roof. The cost of production machinery increased astronomically during the Industrial Revolution, rendering this model obsolete. The means of production became so expensive that only the very rich, or associations of the very rich, could afford to own them. Workers were reduced to wage labor with machinery owned by someone else. The lack of capital to finance factory production was the main reason the Knights of Labor foundered in their attempts to set up cooperative production on the Owenite model.^[83]

Current trends in production technology are a direct reversal of this process, and undermine the technological basis for wage labor and factory production. When goods whose production formerly required factories worth millions of dollars, come within the capability of neighborhood or community cooperative workshops with machinery costing two orders of magnitude less, the dependence of workers on the wage system is decreased. Capitalist employers are increasingly forced to compete with the possibility of self-employment or cooperative employment, driving the rate of profit down.

Intellectual property is an end-run around this tendency, eliminating the threat from small-scale means of production by workers themselves through the ownership of a legal monopoly on the right to produce the product. It represents a shift from surplus labor extraction via direct ownership of the means of production and control of the production process, to surplus extraction from controlling the conditions under which others are allowed to use their own production machinery. Or, as Henry George Jr. put it, collecting tribute from the control of access to natural opportunities rather than from production.^[84]

As Klein puts it: “After establishing the ‘soul’ of their corporations, the superbrand companies have gone on to rid themselves of their cumbersome bodies….”^[85]

Companies that were traditionally satisfied with a 100 percent markup between the cost of factory production and the retail price have been scouring the globe for factories that can make their products so inexpensively that the markup is closer to 400 percent.

And in most countries of the Global South, rather than raising wages, Western corporations’ offshoring production has actually caused the labor share of value-added to fall. This is because the ownership of intellectual property puts Western corporations, to a greater extent native employers a generation ago, in a monopsony position.^[86]

Local governments are in a position of competing for contracts from Western corporations, offering

tax breaks, lax regulations, and the services of a military willing and able to crush labor unrest. To sweeten the pot further, they put their own people on the auction block, falling over each other to offer up the lowest minimum wage, allowing workers to be paid less than the real cost of living.”^[87]

As one Indonesian industry association leader put it: “If the authorities don’t handle strikes…, we will lose our foreign buyers. The government’s income from exports will decrease and unemployment will worsen.”^[88]

The corporations squeeze the contractors, and the squeezing proceeds all the way down the chain of subcontractors.

The only way to understand how rich and supposedly law-abiding multinational corporations could regress to nineteenth-century levels of exploitation (and get caught repeatedly) is through the mechanics of subcontracting itself: at every layer of contracting, subcontracting and homework, the manufacturers bid against each other to drive down the price, and at every level the contractor and subcontractor exact their small profit. At the end of this bid-down, contract-out chain is the worker – often three or four times removed from the company that placed the original order – with a paycheck that has been trimmed at every turn.^[89]

But to repeat yet again: the good news is that, in both the domestic and global economies, this business model is doomed. As argued by a wide range of authors, it sows the seeds of its own destruction.

First of all, the shrinking size of machinery and smaller scale of production facilitated by new production technology makes patents and trademarks much harder to enforce. When most consumer goods are produced in large mass-production factories owned by a handful of oligopoly firms, each producing a handful of basic models, and marketing them through a handful of giant retail chains, the transaction costs of detecting patent violations are comparatively low. When hundreds of thousands of community workshops are freely pirating and modifying proprietary CAD/CAM files and producing the goods in small batches, or illegally producing knockoff spare parts to keep proprietary appliance designs running, the cost of detection becomes astronomical.

And second, as intellectual property becomes harder to enforce, the very proliferation of nodes in distributed corporate logistical chains — originally created to bypass the bargaining power of labor — renders the corporations themselves vulnerable to being bypassed. The shift from physical to human capital as the primary source of productive capacity in so many industries, along with the imploding price and widespread dispersion of ownership of capital equipment in so many industries, means that corporate employers are increasingly hollowed out and only maintain control over the physical production process through legal fictions. When so much of actual physical production is outsourced to the small sweatshop or the home shop, the corporation becomes a redundant “node” that can be bypassed; the worker can simply switch to independent production, cut out the middleman, and deal directly with suppliers and outlets.

David Pollard, writing from the imaginary perspective of 2015, remarked on the vulnerability of corporations that follow the Nike model of hollowing themselves out and outsourcing everything:

In the early 2000s, large corporations that were once hierarchical end-to-end business enterprises began shedding everything that was not deemed ‘core competency’, in some cases to the point where the only things left were business acumen, market knowledge, experience, decision-making ability, brand name, and aggregation skills. This ‘hollowing out’ allowed multinationals to achieve enormous leverage and margin. It also made them enormously vulnerable and potentially dispensable.

As outsourcing accelerated, some small companies discovered how to exploit this very vulnerability. When, for example, they identified North American manufacturers outsourcing domestic production to third world plants in the interest of ‘increasing productivity’, they went directly to the third world manufacturers, offered them a bit more, and then went directly to the North American retailers, and offered to charge them less. The expensive outsourcers quickly found themselves unnecessary middlemen…. The large corporations, having shed everything they thought was non ‘core competency’, learned to their chagrin that in the connected, information economy, the value of their core competency was much less than the inflated value of their stock, and they have lost much of their market share to new federations of small entrepreneurial businesses.^[90]

To take the example of Nike shoes themselves, the larger the percentage that brand-name markup contributes to total retail price, over and above actual costs of production, the greater the incentives will become for the factories producing the actual shoes to defect from the international intellectual property regime. By producing identical shoes (perhaps with the Swoosh in a red circle-and-slashbar) and cutting Nike out of the loop, the factories can eliminate the brand-name markup, raise wages by several hundred percent, and lower prices sufficiently to market their shoes domestically instead of for export to Western consumers. Likewise, the small, networked flexible manufacturing firms in industrial districts like Emilia-Romagna, to the extent that they still participate in the supply chains of transnational manufacturing corporations, by simply ignoring intellectual property laws can bypass the large manufacturers and offer better, cheaper competing versions of their own products.

One of the greatest services libertarians can render to the cause of freedom is to agitate for mass defection from international intellectual property agreements like WIPO and TRIPS — especially by countries in the Global South — and at the same time to promote the development of technical means of circumventing enforcement of copyright law.

V. Intellectual Property, Business Models and Product Design

Earlier, we quoted Murray Rothbard’s observation that the enforcement of intellectual property rights requires the violation of rights in tangible property. As Cory Doctorow argues, this becomes even more true given the business model required by proprietary digital information:

It’s funny that in the name of protecting “intellectual property,” big media companies are willing to do such violence to the idea of real property ­­ arguing that since everything we own, from our t­-shirts to our cars to our ebooks, embody someone’s copyright, patent and trademark, that we’re basically just tenant farmers, living on the land of our gracious masters who’ve seen fit to give us a lease on our homes.^[91]

All-­pervasive DRM prevents the easy transfer of content between platforms, even when it’s simply a matter of the person who purchased a CD or DVD wanting to play it somewhere more convenient. And the DMCA legally prohibits circumventing such DRM, even when — again — the purchaser of the content simply wants to facilitate his own use on a wider and more convenient variety of platforms.

A good recent example of the phenomenon Doctorow commented on is the Amazon Kindle. If Amazon suspends a Kindle account (say, because the user returned too many books), the reader becomes an inert chunk of plastic suitable for use as a doorstop or paperweight. All those e-books already bought and paid for can no longer be read. If the reader falls afoul of Amazon’s good graces, they’ll disable his reader by remote and make the e-books he already “owns” utterly worthless.^[92]

But to repeat once again, and for the last time, the laws on which the enforcement of this business model depends are becoming unenforceable, and the business model itself as a result untenable. According to the (probably hyperbolic) claim of Johan Pouwelse, a scholarly analyst of the P2P phenomenon, copyright will become unenforceable by 2010. If his assessment of the timeline is overly optimistic, his analysis of the causes of copyright’s obsolescence are on the mark. As file-sharing platforms become more popular, they are simultaneously becoming more robust and more secure. For a growing percentage of young people, all the industry admonitions that “file-sharing is theft” fall on deaf ears. Among those younger than thirty or so, file-sharing is simply something that people do, and will continue to do. Any attempt to change this cultural atmosphere will be a losing, rear-guard battle comparable to that faced by the Religious Right. At the same time, file-sharing networks are becoming increasingly user-friendly and attractive to mainstream participants.

Most important of all is the prospect of anonymity and security against the punitive efforts of proprietary content lobbyists at MPAA and RIAA. According to Pouwelse,

By 2010 darknets should be able to offer the same performance as traditional P2P software by exploiting social networking,” the article reads, referring to networks that allow file trading without revealing the identity of its participants to outside entities. Just think what would happen if those 72,866 YouTube friends were able to share Hollywood movies within a P2P network that’s as easy to use as YouTube but untraceable by Hollywood. Pouwelse and his colleagues think it’s going to happen within the next two years.^[93]

A major component of the business model that prevails under existing corporate capitalism is the offer of platforms below-cost, coupled with the sale of patented or copyrighted spare parts, accessories, etc., at an enormous markup. So one buys a cell phone for little or nothing, with the contractual obligation to use only a specified service package for so many years; one buys a fairly cheap printer, which uses enormously expensive ink cartridges; one buys a cheap glucometer, with glucose testing strips that cost $100 a box. And to hack one’s phone to use a different service plan, or to manufacture glucose testing strips or generic ink cartridges in competition with the proprietary version, is illegal.^[94] To manufacture generic replacement parts for a car or appliance, in competition with the corporate dealership, is likewise illegal.

As it is now, appliances are generally designed to thwart repair. When the Maytag repairman tells you it would cost more than it’s worth to repair your washing machine, he’s telling the truth. But he fails to add that that state of affairs reflects deliberate design: the washing machine could have been designed on a modular basis, had the company so chosen, so that the defective part might have been cheaply and easily replaced.

Absent legal constraints, it would be profitable to offer competing generic replacements and accessories for other companies’ platforms. And in the face of such market competition, there would be strong pressure toward modular product designs that were amenable to repair, and interoperable with the modular components and accessories of other companies’ platforms. Absent the legal constraints presented by patents, an appliance which was designed to thwart ease of repair through incompatibility with other companies’ platforms would suffer a competitive disadvantage.

Intellectual property promotes planned obsolescence by thwarting not only the cheap and easy repair of physical hardware, but by the use of proprietary software that can render the hardware useless.

“Repair prevention,” according to Emily Matchar, is a rapidly growing method for enforcing planned obsolescence or turning repairs into a cash cow. Cars and most appliances now have embedded software, which is usually proprietary. “Some companies use digital locks or copyrighted software to prevent consumers or independent repair people from making changes. Others simply refuse to share their repair manuals. Some add fine print clauses to their user agreements so customers (often unwittingly) promise not to fix their own products.”^[95]

The price gouging these methods enable is disgraceful. An “authorized” iPhone battery replacement costs $79, compared to the $30 Matchar paid for an unauthorized replacement at a Hong Kong electronics mall, and the $35 iFixit (about which more below) charges for a mail-order replacement kit. Several years ago Julian Sanchez managed to defeat the purposefully impossible to open casing on his iPhone and unjam a button, rather than take the Genius Bar’s advice and replace it for $250 (“Dammit, Apple,” June 2, 2008).

Besides price gouging, this proprietary planned obsolescence takes a heavy toll in wasted resources and environmental destruction. Tech Dump, an organization that refurbishes discarded electronics and sells them to the poor at affordable prices, is only able to refurbish about 15% of the computers, cell phones and TVs it takes in either because replacement parts are proprietary or repair information is closely guarded. Imagine the savings in rare earth metals — a trade associated with some of the worst conflict regions and labor exploitation on Earth — without this barrier to recycling electronics.

Patented spare parts and copyrighted diagnostic software both increasingly lock independent repair shops out of the market.

This is where the right-to-repair activists come in. One of the most notable organizations is iFixit — the purveyor of that nifty unauthorized iPhone battery replacement kit — an online “repair Wiki” which “provides repair instructions and DIY advice and tools.” An independent medical equipment repairman in Tanzania maintains a website (frankshospitalworkshop.com), which hosts manuals and other repair information for infant incubators, heart monitors and the like — a public service for which he is constantly harassed by manufacturers.

There’s also a big market in unauthorized jailbreaks for appliances that charge ungodly amounts of money for accessories like ink cartridges, and for jailbroken software for running machinery. Take the software that John Deere tractors run on. According to John Deere’s lawyers, “[b]ecause computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

Over the last two decades, manufacturers have used the DMCA to argue that consumers do not own the software underpinning the products they buy—things like smartphones, computers, coffeemakers, cars, and, yes, even tractors….

In recent years, some companies have even leveraged the DMCA to stop owners from modifying the programming on those products. This means you can’t strip DRM off smart kitty litter boxes, install custom software on your iPad, or alter the calibration on a tractor’s engine. Not without potentially running afoul of the DMCA.^[96]

It also prevents repair of tractors by independent shops, which means farmers are stuck paying the exorbitant monopoly prices of John Deere.

John Deere’s tractor firmware prevents the owners from making an unauthorized repairs. Whenever maintenance is needed, an authorized agent needs to swing by and connect to the tractor with diagnostic software. They okay the repair, and the tractor then works. Without that, it’s a very big paperweight. John Deere charges several hundred dollars for service calls, plus $150 per hour for the technician.

Many U.S. farmers are instead buying jailbroken diagnostic software from pirates in Poland and Ukraine.^[97]

Additional Note on the Role of Intellectual Property in Enshittification. In the fourteen years since I wrote the first edition of this paper, the process of communications and entertainment platform enshittification (to borrow Cory Doctorow’s apt term) has intensified beyond anything I imagined. And intellectual property is the primary enabler of that process.

Of course, a certain amount of enshittification is entailed in the technical requirements of IP enforcement itself: witness the effect of DRM, as we saw above, on the quality of content. But that’s only the beginning. Intellectual property is also the basis for an entire business strategy centered on deliberate enshittification. Enshittification goes a step beyond even ordinary capitalist profit, and actively destroys value in order to maximize rent extraction.

We also observed, in connection with Thomas Hodgskin’s observations on landlords holding potentially productive land out of use because it could not provide a rentier income in addition to its other productive services, that monopoly ownership of information results in things of value not being available — or in their actually being permanently destroyed — unless they can satisfy the demand for continually expanding super-profits. Content which, in a competitive industry, would be left on the market so long as it was profitable at all, is taken off the market because it isn’t profitable enough.

We see media conglomerates, because of their monopoly rights to content and ability to hold it off the market altogether if it’s seen as insufficiently profitable, not only canceling wildly popular shows but destroying works of entertainment that have already been produced.

The standard justification is “cost-cutting” — eliminating the payment of residuals — or that the property is worth more as a tax write-off than for the revenue it would bring in. It’s more credible to assume that holding even slightly profitable content off the market, that there would be an incentive to make available for the modest returns absent copyright monopolies, becomes profitable under copyright because the copyright holder sees them as competing for an audience with more lucrative properties. The same principle applied, to a lesser degree, in the pre-digital era:

Wait a second, you might say, if a small publisher can make money by publishing the old classic for the market niche interested in it, why do you argue that the big publisher will not? Answer: because for the big publisher the old classic is more valuable unpublished than published! The cheap Devil paperback version of a sixty-year-old spy story would, to some degree, reduce demand for the expensive hardback version of a brand-new spy story.^[98]

For example, HBO Max in 2022 deleted numerous episodes of Sesame Street, along with dozens of other TV shows and movies.^[99] In early June of 2023, Disney purged its lineup of over 100 titles — some of them just produced — in order to write them off on their taxes.^[100] Paramount Plus did the same thing just a few weeks later.^[101]

But if anyone is the human face of media enshittification, it’s David Zaslav — the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, and of Discovery before the merger with Warner Bros. Following the merger he canceled distribution of a number of movies — including Batgirl — that had already been produced, and tossed them down the memory hole as a loss for tax purposes. He also made the utterly brainless decision to rebrand HBOMax — a household name — as “Max,” purged the Max catalog of 87 titles (including Westworld and Space Ghost Coast to Coast), and gutted the management of TCM and sold off a large portion of its film library. As Jason Bailey describes him (in a GQ article preserved by Internet Archive, after GQ took it down under pressure from stooges of the thin-skinned Zaslav),

there’s a crucial difference between Zaslav and the old-school moguls he’s attempting to emulate: They loved movies, and cared about filmmakers. Zaslav sees movies as “content,” sees filmmakers as “content creators,” and is only interested in maintaining, preserving, and presenting “content” that can make him and his stockholders a quick buck. Anything that doesn’t, he’ll happily gut. He’s closer to Logan Roy than Jack Warner and there is a genuine, understandable fear that his bean-counting represents not just shrugging indifference but outright hostility to cinema and its rich history.

In Pretty Woman, Richard Gere stars as Edward Lewis, a corporate raider who buys companies “that are in financial difficulty” and sells off their pieces. “So it’s sort of like stealing cars and selling them for the parts, right?” asks call girl Vivian (Julia Roberts), when he explains what he does, and it’s hard not to think of Lewis when looking over Zaslav’s reign at Warner Bros Discovery, stepping into the distressed conglomerate and stripping it for parts.

Edward Lewis, however, is at least honest about what he does. “You don’t make anything,” Vivian notes, and he agrees; “You don’t build anything,” she continues, and he concurs with that as well. And perhaps that’s why David Zaslav is earning a concerning reputation so far. He’s out here carrying on like a mogul, but based on his performance to date, he’s only good at breaking things.^[102]

Note well that all this destruction of value is possible only because intellectual property legally prevents anyone else from saving content whose owner wants to memory hole it. Absent copyright, any show or movie removed from one streaming service’s catalog would be immediately snatched up by its competitors, eager to poach subscribers from their rival.

We see the same phenomenon with the enshittification of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, retail platforms like Amazon, and so-called “sharing economy” apps like Uber and Airbnb. Intellectual property, combined with other artificial scarcities like legal penalties for “felony contempt of business model,” enables platforms to lock users in through network effects.

Network effects raise the cost, from the user’s perspective, of switching from one platform to another. As an illustration, consider the telephone. For the first person to install it, the telephone was useless until a second person was connected. At that point it acquired some value to the extent that the two might want to talk to each other. As additional users were added to the system, the number of potential interactions — and the value of the system to any given user — increased as the square of the number of users (Metcalfe’s Law).

A social media platform has lock-in over its users to the extent that they hesitate to leave because of the number of connections they have there. Time and again, new social media platforms are set up as alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, and attempt to lure disgruntled users from the increasingly enshittified older platforms. But regardless of how superior the user interface or terms of service of the new platform are, it quickly reaches a saturation point at, at most, one or two percent of the Facebook and Twitter user base. The reason? People don’t want to migrate because none of their old Facebook or Twitter friends are on the new platform.

Companies like high switching costs. For a would-be monopolist, the best product is one that’s seductively easy to start using and incredibly hard to get rid of….

But when you want to leave Facebook, there’s no easy way to do so. You can’t go to a Facebook rival and follow what your friends post to Facebook from there. You certainly can’t reply to what your Facebook friends post using a rival service….^[103]

And, predictably, businesses with captive clienteles will take advantage of their position to shamelessly abuse their customers.

Businesspeople understand the risks of competition, which is why they seek to extinguish it. The harder it is for your customers to leave – because of a lack of competitors or because of lock-in – the worse you can treat them without risking their departure. This is the core of enshittification: a company that is neither disciplined by competition nor regulation can abuse its customers and suppliers over long timescales without losing either….^[104]

Of course, the switching costs from network effects only result in lock-in when the only choices presented by a platform are to use it or leave, with nothing in between. It would be possible to nullify network effects as a barrier to migration, using a principle Doctorow calls “adversarial interoperability.”

“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.

But interoperability is just the ante. For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.^[105]

In the case of social media, this means you could piggyback user-governed instances as overlays of the Facebook or Twitter architecture (basically the Fediverse model), and import and continue to interact with your old Facebook and Twitter connections, but with your own terms of service and features — all without the permission of Facebook or Twitter. With adversarial interoperability,

Facebook alternatives like Diaspora could use their users’ logins and passwords to fetch the Facebook messages the service had queued up for them and allow those users to reply to them from Diaspora, without being spied on by Facebook. Mastodon users could read and post to Twitter without touching Twitter’s servers. Hundreds or thousands of services could spring up that allowed users different options to block harassment and bubble up interesting contributions from other users — both those on the incumbent social media services, and the users of these new upstarts. It’s true that unlike Usenet, Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to block this kind of federation, so perhaps the experience won’t be as seamless as it was for alt. users mixing their feeds in with the backbone’s feeds, but the main hurdle – moving to a new service without having to convince everyone to come with you – could be vanquished.^[106]

Doctorow envisions a similar model of adversarial interoperability for ride-sharing apps:

Imagine if I could install a version of [Austin’s driver-governed ride-sharing app] Ride (call it Meta-Uber) that knew about all the driver co-ops in the world. When I landed, I’d page a car with Uber or Lyft, but once a driver accepted the hail, my Meta-Uber app would signal the driver’s phone and ask, “Do you have a driver co-op app on your phone?” If the driver and I both had the co-op app, our apps would cancel the Uber reservation and re-book the trip with Meta-Uber.

That way, we could piggyback on the installed base of Uber and Lyft cars, the billions they’ve poured into getting rideshare services legalized in cities around the world, the marketing billions they’ve spent making us all accustomed to the idea of rideshare services.

This Meta-Uber service would allow for a graceful transition from the shareholder-owned rideshares to worker co-ops. When you needed a car, you’d get one, without having to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of no drivers because there are no passengers because there are no drivers. One fare at a time, we could cannibalize Lyft and Uber into the poorhouse.

The billions they’ve spent to establish “first-mover advantages” wouldn’t be unscalable stone walls around their business: they’d be immovable stone weights around their necks. Lyft and Uber would have multi-billion-dollar capital overhangs that their investors would expect to recoup, while the co-ops that nimbly leapt over Uber and Lyft would not have any such burden.

The same model could be applied to virtually any platform: “a Meta-Amazon that places your order with the nearest indy bookstore instead; a Meta-OpenTable that redirects your booking to a co-op booking tool.”^[107]

But the media conglomerates and “sharing” apps have made it impossible to circumvent network effects lock-in, thanks to legal barriers.

Tech law is a minefield of overly broad, superannuated rules that have been systematically distorted by companies that used “disruption” to batter their way into old industries, but now use these laws to shield themselves from any pressure from upstarts to seek to disrupt them.

First is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, passed in 1986 in part to assuage Ronald Reagan’s panic after seeing the movie Wargames (I am not making this up). CFAA is nominally an anti-computer-intrusion statute, which criminalizes “exceeding your authorization” on a computer that doesn’t belong to you. Even when it passed, more than 40 years ago, technologically clued-in scholars and practicioners warned that this was way too broadly defined, and that someday we might see this rule used to felonize normal activities involving computers we owned, because the computers would have to talk to a server to accomplish part of their work, and the server’s owner could use onerous “user agreements” and “terms of service” to define our authorization. If this became widespread, then these licenses could take on the force of criminal law, and violating them could become a jailable offense.

40 years later, those fears are vindicated: CFAA is used to threaten, intimidate, sue, and even jail people engaged in otherwise perfectly lawful activity, merely because they have violated some term of service on the way….

Then there’s Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a Bill Clinton bill that creates a felony for “bypassing an effective means of access control” (AKA Digital Rights Management or DRM) for copyrighted works.

…[Today, DRM] is used for “business model enforcement,” to ensure that disruptive, but legal, ways of using a product or service are made illegal – from refilling your printer’s ink cartridge to getting your car or phone serviced by an independent neighborhood repair shop.

Together, the CFAA and DMCA have given digital businesses access to a shadowy legal doctrine that was never written by Congress but is nevertheless routinely enforced by the courts: Felony Contempt of Business-Model.

The CFAA and DMCA 1201 have been carefully distorted into defensive, anti-disruption shields that are only available to digital businesses. Taxi medallion owners can’t use the CFAA and DMCA 1201 to keep Uber and Lyft out of their cities.

But Uber and Lyft could use these legal tools to keep Meta-Uber out of their bottom lines. Uber and Lyft have lengthy terms-of-service that set out the rules under which you are authorized to communicate with Uber and Lyft’s servers. These terms of service prohibit using their servers to locate drivers for any purpose other than booking a ride. They certainly don’t permit you to locate a driver and then cancel the booking and re-book with a co-op app.

And Uber and Lyft’s apps are encrypted on your phone, so to reverse-engineer them, you’d have to decrypt them (probably by capturing an image of their decrypted code while it was running in a virtual phone simulated on a desktop computer). Decrypting an app without permission is “bypassing an effective means of access control” for a copyrighted work (the app is made up of copyrighted code).^[108]

Doctorow suggests a legal reform: “an absolute legal defence for companies that make ‘interoperable’ products that plug into the dominant companies’ offerings”

from third-party printer ink to unauthorised Facebook readers that slurp up all the messages waiting for you there and filter them to your specifications, not Mark Zuckerberg’s. This interoperability defence would have to shield digital toolsmiths from all manner of claims: tortious interference, bypassing copyright locks, patent infringement and, of course, violating terms of service.^[109]

An Additional Note on Circumvention. During the period since I last wrote, likewise, piracy has largely stagnated or even declined in scale. The explanation lies not in increasing difficulty or risk entailed in violating IP law, or the failure of expected developments in the means of circumvention to materialize — if anything, file-sharing is far more convenient and safe today than it was then, and even more people view the practice as normal — but in the availability of reasonably priced and convenient online access.

As already noted, there’s a natural convenience rent entailed in offering authorized copies of music or movies online; so long as the price isn’t excessive, the advantage in convenience is sufficient to make the transaction worth it from the standpoint of those who are not unusually time-rich and money-poor. The rise of such reasonably priced legal alternatives — most notably iTunes and Netflix — put an enormous dent in piracy.

In the case of music, the availability of reasonably priced legal music services caused a dramatic drop in illegal file-sharing. In the Scandinavian countries, “over half the people who previously downloaded music illegally no longer do so after they have been given access to a streaming service.”^[110] In Norway, music piracy dropped by about five-sixths between 2008 and 2012, and pirating movies by half. In the Netherlands, the number of people engaged in music piracy fell from 5 million in 2008 to 1.8 million in 2012.^[111]

So in a sense, this was a big victory for piracy: it was competition from the availability of file-sharing that forced content industries to offer cheap online viewing and listening options. It’s comparable to the way that — as capitalist farmers in Britain complained in the 18th century — access to the commons, before Enclosure, competed with wage employment as a method of subsistence and thus constrained employers in their rate of exploitation.

The drastic reduction in piracy will last only as long as affordable streaming services are available. This does not bode well for the content industry, seeing as how in the past few years we’ve gone from the simplicity of a streaming market dominated by Netflix to the proliferation of in-house streaming services dedicated entirely to the content of individual media corporations — a situation increasingly characterized by “fracturing content availability.”^[112] As the number of subscriptions required to access a full range of content multiplies, we can expect a resurgence of file-sharing.

At Techdirt, Karl Bode noted that, because of the increasing number of streaming services and the increasing share of content that is exclusive to particular services,

as consumers are forced to pay for more and more subscriptions to get all of the content they’re looking for, they’re not only getting frustrated by the growing costs (defeating the whole point of cutting the cord), they’re frustrated by the experience of having to hunt and peck through an endlessly shifting sea of exclusivity arrangements and licensing deals that make it difficult to track where your favorite show or film resides this month.

And a 2019 survey found that consumers were “frustrated by the growing number of subscriptions and services required to watch what they want…”^[113] As each of the media conglomerates, with its own streaming service, sees itself as being in “a race to lock down as many exclusives to its platform as is humanly possible,” consumers are increasingly developing “subscription fatigue.”^[114] And, Bode adds, “a lot of these customers are going to revert to piracy.”^[115] He predicts a “slow but steady shift back to piracy among users that find subscribing to a half dozen streaming services too expensive, or hunting and pecking for their favorite paywalled content annoying.”^[116]

At Slate, Katharine Trendacosta observes similarly that, in the new media environment,

instead of paying one cable bill for all the channels, the ones we want and those we don’t, we’re paying for countless individual services just for the one or two programs or movies we want to watch on each of them. And that will bring back piracy, which is bouncing back after having been on the decline for years.^[117]

Netflix itself has triggered a mass backlash against its price hikes and ban on password sharing (after actively encouraging password sharing with tweets that “Love is sharing a password” in 2017). In response to the threat of mass exodus by disgruntled subscribers, in February of this year it lowered prices in over 100 countries.^[118] By May, it had lost a million subscribers in Spain over the new password sharing policy.^[119] And in May it also reacted in panic by delaying the crackdown on password sharing.^[120]

VI. Is Intellectual Property a Necessary Incentive?

Advocates for intellectual property defend it as necessary to encourage innovation and artistic creation, asking what the incentive for creation would be without it.

The primary result of abolishing copyright would be the proliferation of many, many more artistic voices than now dominate our culture. As Boldrin and Levine note, while copyright may increase returns to the holder of the monopoly, it also enormously increases the cost of cultural creation.

It is crucial to recognize that intellectual monopoly is a double-edged sword. The rewards to innovative effort are certainly greater if success is awarded a government monopoly. But the existence of monopolies also increases the cost of creation. In one extreme case, a movie that cost $218 to make had to pay $400,000 for the music rights.^[121]

The practical effect is to limit any form of creation which relies on the work of others to those artists who are represented by deep pocket corporations, and can rely on them to negotiate rights on their behalf. Even when musical or cinematic creation is cheap in its own right, control over it is monopolized by a handful of giant media corporations which can manage the IP issues. The result is a musical and cinematic media marketplace in which a handful of corporations churn out reworked versions of the same formula over, and over, and over — no commentary on the Marvel Cinematic Universe implied.

The conventional argument for the necessity of patents is that the developer of a new technology must be able to charge a price higher than the marginal cost of production, in order to recoup the outlay — a fixed cost — of development. Without a patent monopoly, the developer will be faced by competition which drives the price down to production cost, and the money previously sunk into research and development will be a dead loss.

But in fact patents suppress innovation as much as they encourage it. This is because of the “shoulders of giants” effect. Contrary to the popular trope, inventions are almost never the work of a lone genius. Technological innovations are the creation of social intellect. We see multiple variations on inventions like the telephone, radio, internal combustion engine, etc., appearing in numerous places at about the same time, because 1) the technical prerequisites for them are all in existence, and 2) there is a widely perceived need for them. Any new invention presupposes a wide variety of existing technologies that are combined and reworked into a new configuration. Patents on existing technologies may or may not marginally increase the incentives to new invention, but they also increase the cost of doing so by levying a tariff on the aggregation of existing knowledge to serve as building blocks of a new invention.^[122]

James Watt’s refusal to license his patent on the steam engine, for example, prevented others from improving the design until the patent expired in 1800. This delayed the introduction of locomotives and steamboats.^[123] According to Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine: “Once Watt’s patents were secured and production started, he devoted a substantial portion of his energy to fending off rival inventors.”

…[I]n the 1790s, when the superior Hornblower engine was put into production, Boulton and Watt went after Jonathan Hornblower with the full force of the legal system.

During the period of Watt’s patents, the United Kingdom added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Watt’s patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during the period of Watt’s patent; however between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a factor of five.^[124]

Other people’s patents, ironically, hindered Watt from improving his own steam engine design.

An important limitation of the original Newcomen engine was its inability to deliver a steady rotary motion. The most convenient solution, involving the combined use of the crank and a flywheel, relied on a method patented by James Pickard, which prevented Watt from using it. Watt also made various attempts to efficiently transform reciprocating motion into rotary motion, reaching, apparently, the same solution as Pickard. But the existence of a patent forced him to contrive an alternative, less efficient mechanical device, the “sun and planet” gear. It was only in 1794, after the expiration of Pickard’s patent, that Boulton and Watt adopted the economically and technically superior crank.^[125]

The same is true of computer software. Boldrin and Levine enumerate a long list of innovations —

all the graphical user interfaces; the widgets such as buttons and icons; the compilers, assemblers, linked lists, object-oriented programs, databases, search algorithms, font displays, word processing, and computer languages – all the vast array of algorithms and methods that go into even the simplest modern program.

— and note that all were developed before 1981, and hence without patent protection. Had software patents been in place back then, no less an intellectual property maximalist than Bill Gates admits that progress in the computer industry industry would have been arrested.

…[H]ad all these bits and pieces of computer programs been patented, as they certainly would have in the current regime, far from being enhanced, progress in the software industry would never have taken place. According to Bill Gates – hardly your radical communist or utopist – “if people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”^[126]

The same is true of copyrights in software, incidentally. Although code was frequently copyrighted, in the early days of the computer industry copyrights were largely ignored and seldom enforced. Meanwhile, a thriving Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement — which developed its own operating system, browser, and productivity suite — has existed alongside proprietary software since the 1990s. In addition, much of the software that the Internet’s infrastructure runs on is open-source.^[127]

Rothbard pointed out that patents eliminate “the competitive spur for further research” because incremental innovation based on others’ patents is hindered, and because the holder can “rest on his laurels for the entire period of the patent,” with no fear of a competitor improving his invention. And they hamper technical progress because “mechanical inventions are discoveries of natural law rather than individual creations, and hence similar independent inventions occur all the time. The simultaneity of inventions is a familiar historical fact.”^[128] Patents are in fact a “substitute for research and development,” actually removing the incentive for constant innovation in order to stay ahead of one’s competitors.^[129]

Patents also distort whatever research and innovation does occur in artificial directions — toward patentable research, at the expense of non-patentable research.^[130] Chakravarthi Raghavan argued, likewise, that patents and industrial security programs prevent sharing of information, and suppress competition in further improvement of patented inventions.^[131]

And patents are not necessary as an incentive to innovate. According to Rothbard, invention is motivated not only by the quasi-rents accruing to the first firm to introduce an innovation, but by the threat of being surpassed in product features or productivity by its competitors. He cites Arnold Plant: “In active competition… no business can afford to lag behind its competitors. The reputation of a firm depends upon its ability to keep ahead, to be the first in the market with new improvements in its products and new reductions in their prices.”^[132]

This is borne out by F. M. Scherer’s testimony before the Federal Trade Commission in 1995. Scherer spoke of a survey of 91 companies in which only seven “accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R & D investments.” Most of them described patents as “the least important of considerations.” Most companies considered their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be “the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales.”^[133] According to a Carnegie Survey in 2000, similarly, the firms responsible for over two thousand process and product innovations reported that secrecy, lead time, complementary manufacturing, and complementary sales/service were all more effective than patents in recouping research and development outlays^[134] — all things, in one way or another, connected to first-mover advantage.

In another study, Scherer found no negative effect on R & D spending as a result of compulsory licensing of patents. A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would have been developed without patents. In the case of automobiles, office equipment, rubber products, and textiles, the figure was 100%.^[135]

The one supposed exception was drugs, according to Scherer, of which 60% would not have been invented. But it’s likely Scherer underestimated the effect of drug patents in discouraging or distorting innovation. For one thing, drug companies get an unusually high portion of their R & D funding from the government, and many of their most lucrative products were developed entirely at government expense. And Scherer himself cited evidence to the contrary. The reputation advantage for being the first into a market is considerable. For example in the late 1970s, the structure of the industry and pricing behavior was found to be very similar between drugs with and those without patents. Being the first mover with a non-patented drug allowed a company to maintain a 30% market share and to charge premium prices. We have already seen, in the previous chapter, the extent to which the direction of innovation is skewed by considerations of gaming the patent system and patent trolling the competition. The majority of research and development is geared toward developing “me, too” drugs: in essence slightly different versions of existing drugs, tweaked just enough to justify repatenting. Boldrin and Levine call these drugs “redundant” (“replacements for drugs that already exist,” which “have little or no economic value in a world without patents”) and regard the disproportionate share of industry costs devoted to them — “about 75 percent of all R&D cost” — as mostly waste driven by the imperatives of the patent system.^[136]

What’s more, there’s reason to doubt that the actual cost of R&D is nowhere near as great as the pharmaceutical industry claims.

The Consumer Project on Technology examined the cost of clinical trials for orphan drugs – good data are available for these drugs because they are eligible for special government benefits. A pharmaceutical industry– sponsored study estimated the average cost of clinical trials for a drug at about $24.5 million 1995 dollars. However, for orphan drugs where better data are available, the average cost of clinical trials was only about $6.5 million 1995 dollars – yet there is no reason to believe that these clinical trials are in any way atypical.^[137]

The injustice is only compounded by government funding of research and innovation, with private industry reaping monopoly profits from technology it spent little or nothing to develop. The Government Patent Policy Act of 1980, with 1984 and 1986 amendments, allowed private industry to keep patents on products developed with government R & D money – and then to charge ten, twenty, or forty times the cost of production. For example, AZT was developed with government money, and the patent subsequently given away to Burroughs Wellcome Corp.^[138] As if the deck were not sufficiently stacked already, Congress has more than once extended drug companies’ patents beyond the expiration of their normal term under patent law; as just one example, the pharmaceutical companies in 1999 lobbied Congress to extend certain patents by two years by a special act of private law.^[139]

The pharmaceutical industry, whose profits result largely from state-granted monopolies, has the incentive to innovate which is typical of monopolies: i.e., little or none.

…[B]ecause of generalized and everextended patenting, large pharmaceutical companies have grown accustomed to operating like monopolies. Monopolies innovate as little as possible and only when forced to; in general, they would rather spend time seeking rents via political protection while trying to sell at a high price their old refurbished products to the powerless consumers, via massive doses of advertising: “[Pharmaceutical] Companies today have found that the return on investment for legal tactics is a lot higher than the return on investment for R&D,” says Sharon Levine, the associate executive director of the HMO Kaiser Permanente. “Consumers today are paying an inordinate premium under the guise of the creating the stream of innovation in the future. But it’s actually funding lawyers.”^[140]

Copyrights have also been granted arbitrary extension for certain favored parties (e.g., copyright extension, sponsored by Sonny Bono, for Disney’s “Mickey Mouse” trademark). This is in addition to the draconian copyright protections, described above, already in force under general law. But copyright protection is no more necessary for artistic creation than patents are necessary for invention. There are many businesses, in the open-source world, that manage to make money from auxiliary services even though their content itself is not proprietary. For example, even though Red Hat cannot restrict the copying of the Linux software it distributes, it does quite well customizing the software and offering specialized customer support.^[141]

Radiohead once made an album available online for free, while collecting voluntary donations with what amounted to a glorified PayPal tip jar. Phish has actively encouraged fans to share its music free of charge, while making money off of live performances and concessions.  Alexander Abnos of the band Secret Cities once reported a conversation with a concert attendee, specifically noting that downloading brought fans to the concerts of a “little-known band.”

Attendee: “I downloaded [insert Secret Cities album name here] illegally! Hope you don’t mind!”

Me: “Nope!”

I wasn’t lying. I didn’t really mind. We didn’t really mind. The reason is absurdly simple: This person heard our music, and enjoyed it enough to come to a show. Most times, they brought friends along. As a little-known band on the road, what more can you really ask for?^[142]

The Radiohead model is especially interesting in its implications for making a living off open-source production. Since, as we have already seen, the cost of the physical capital necessary for recording and sound editing has imploded, the overhead costs which must be serviced by an open-source music distributor are miniscule. And since the listeners themselves bear the cost of physical reproduction (i.e., they burn their own CDs), whatever revenue stream comes in from voluntary contributions — even if it averages only a dollar or two per listener — belongs to the artist free and clear. And even if the content provider charges a price for the download, there is a significant rent entailed in the cost of setting up a rival download service and selling the same content for a lower price. So for all but the biggest blockbuster music groups and publishers, if the content provider charges a low enough price, the transaction costs involved in going through a file-sharing network, or setting up a competing download service just to sell the content for fifty cents instead of a dollar, probably exceed the likely returns. Unless the content providers attempt to price gouge in the way that record companies have done in recent years, or they are forced to service the overhead costs from supporting corporate management and shareholders, they are likely to benefit more than suffer from free culture.

Under the existing business model of proprietary content corporations, only an infinitesimal minority — the companies’ stables of blockbuster creators — are able to make a bare living, let alone get rich, from royalties. And the “artists deserve to be paid” propaganda comes from the very corporate bosses who do their best to see that artists don’t get paid. It’s the corporate gatekeepers and middlemen who get rich at the expense of both underpaid artists and price-gouged consumers.

So it’s hard to imagine content creators not being better off under virtually any model based on open licensing, direct marketing to fans, and using content to sell auxiliary services. And that turns out to be the case. For example, a 2011 report commissioned by the Swiss government found that piracy had little effect on artists; regardless of the amount of file-sharing — and contrary to the so-called “lost sale” doctrine — “consumers spend a roughly constant share of their disposable income on entertainment expenses. Money saved on buying CDs and DVDs are instead spent on ‘concerts, movies, and merchandising.’” And whatever harm resulted from file-sharing fell, not on the artists, but on the large media production companies.^[143]

Since intellectual property is not necessary to encourage innovation, this means that its main practical effect is to cause economic inefficiency by levying a monopoly charge on the use of existing technology.

In any case, for those whose libertarianism follows from the principles of self-ownership and nonaggression, whether “intellectual property” is necessary for those engaged in certain forms of economic activity to profit is beside the point. The same argument is used by protectionists: certain businesses would be unprofitable if they weren’t protected from competition by tariffs. So what? No one has a right to profit at someone else’s expense, through the use of force. In particular, no one has the right to make a profit by using the state to prevent others from doing as they please with their own pen and paper, hard drives, or CDs. A business model that isn’t profitable without government intervention should fail.

It’s instructive that the media and entertainment giants that whine about new technology destroying their profit model are the very same companies that (for example) use new technology like AI themselves to eliminate writers’ jobs. So if executives and shareholders of companies that use technology to render skilled workers obsolete, now find themselves threatened by file-sharing, cutting and pasting, hyperlinks, etc. — well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys. If workers don’t have a property right in their jobs in the face of new technology, then neither do capitalists have a property in the accrual of profits from a business model rendered obsolete by new technology.

Intellectual property, finally, hinders innovation in another way we have not yet considered: it increases the cost of putting and keeping one’s own ideas in the public domain, for those who prefer to do so. The content originator or inventor must take defensive measures to prevent his idea, which he leaves in the public domain, from being copyrighted by someone else with the intent of depriving him of its use.

This is not such a problem for copyright. Copyleft, the GNU General Public License and the Creative Commons license all presuppose strong copyright laws, and piggyback on standard copyright. Such licenses allow virtually unlimited reproduction and circulation of material under a broad range of circumstances, on the condition that the secondary user make his own use of the material publicly available under the terms of the same license. Copyright protection is simply retained in self-defense, to prevent material in the public domain from being copyrighted by secondary users. Were there no copyright laws in existence in the first place, there would be no need for the GPL or CC license. Patents, however, raise far more difficult issues. Vinay Gupta’s account of his experiences with the hexayurt, an open-source form of cheap emergency housing for refugees living in shantytowns and tent cities, is instructive in this regard.

Look, the problem is this: GPL enforceability rests on strong copyright law.

Hardware, however, is typically not covered by copyright, leaving patent.

Patents are expensive.

So you can patent-with-open-license if you can afford it, or you can publish and it drops into the public domain (i.e. is no longer patentable) and some other bastard can patent things around or enclosing your invention, and then you’re an unhappy camper.

Been through this with the Hexayurt and there’s no good answer right now. I strongly tend towards the public-domain-and-pray approach, personally.^[144]

One cannot simply choose not to patent an invention and entrust it safely to the public domain. It is necessary to pay the enormous expense of obtaining a patent in order to enforce the continued public domain status of one’s own invention, and keep it from being stolen by corporate pirates.

In Summary…

Intellectual property is theft. Smash the state.

 

 

---

Appendix: Copyright Circumvention Tools

Some useful sites on my laptop that I use regularly.

Bypassing paywalls. One or the other of these will jailbreak the vast majority of paywalled articles.

https://archive.org/
https://archive.vn/
https://archive.ph/
https://12ft.io/
https://www.removepaywall.com/

Books and paywalled academic journals.

http://libgen.rs/ At least 95% of scholarly books and journals.
https://annas-archive.org/ A lot of popular fiction and nonfiction not in LibGen.

Movies and TV Shows.

https://bflix.io/home/
https://flixwave.to/

 

 

---

Endnotes

^[1] Lysander Spooner, The Law of Intellectual Property; or, An Essay on the Right of Authors and Inventors to a Perpetual Property in Their Ideas (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855) <http://www.lysanderspooner.org/intellect/contents.htm>.

^[2] “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ,” in Benjamin R. Tucker, Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One. Gordon Press facsimile (New York: 1973 [1897]), p. 13.

^[3] Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: The New American Library Inc., 1967), p. 130.

^[4] Ibid., p. 132.

^[5] N. Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), p. 16n. This monograph first appeared as an article in the symposium Applications of Libertarian Legal Theory, published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies 15, no. 2 (Spring 2001).

^[6] Ibid., p. 27.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Chicago: Regnery, 1949, 1963, 1966), pp. 385-386, 680-681.

^[9] Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Auburn, Ala.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1962, 1970, 1993), p. 655.

^[10] Ibid., pp. 657-658.

^[11] Ibid., p. 654.

^[12] Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, p. 46.

^[13] Quasibill, “Contract Enforcement Consolidation,” The Bell Tower, December 20, 2007. (Site now defunct. Preserved at Internet Archive <https://web.archive.org/web/20071226051617/http://the-bell-tower.blogspot.com/2007/12/contract-enforcement-consolidation.html>. Accessed July 29, 2023).

^[14] Stephan Kinsella comment under Aheram, “The Validity of End User License Agreements Redux,” Copyfascism Watch, December 2, 2008 <http://mises.org/Community/blogs/copyfascism/archive/2008/12/02/the-validity-of-end-user-license-agreements-redux.aspx>. (Link now defunct; preserved by Internet Archive at <https://web.archive.org/web/20081208022102/http://mises.org/Community/blogs/copyfascism/archive/2008/12/02/the-validity-of-end-user-license-agreements-redux.aspx>. Accessed July 29, 2023.)

^[15] Kinsella comment under David K. Levine, “Can You Contract Away Fair Use?” Against Monopoly, April 13, 2009
<http://www.againstmonopoly.org/index.php?perm=593056000000000868>. (Link to comment now defunct.)

^[16] Charles Johnson, “How Intellectual Protectionism promotes the progress of science and the useful arts,” Rad Geek People’s Daily, May 28, 2008 <http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/28/how_intellectual/>.

^[17] Richard Stallman, “The Right to Read” (updated 2007). It originally appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2) <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html>.

^[18] Michel Bauwens, Peer to Peer and Human Evolution. (Foundation for P2P Alternatives, 2005) <http://62.210.98.10/IMG/P2PandHumanEvolV2.pdf>, pp. 60-61.

2023 Note: Any citation of Michel Bauwens should be accompanied by an acknowledgement of his obsessive promotion of alt right, “Intellectual Dark Web” and anti-“woke” ideology the past several years, which has destroyed not only his own reputation but to a considerable extent the legacy of the P2P Foundation <https://c4ss.org/content/54521>; <https://p2p-left.gitlab.io/statement/appendix/>.

^[19] Bauwens, “Can the experience economy be capitalist?” P2P Foundation Blog, September 27, 2007 <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/can-the-experience-economy-be-capitalist/2007/09/27>.

^[20] Johan Soderberg, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 144-145.

^[21] Deborah Durham-Vichr, “Focus on the DeCSS trial,” CNN.Com, July 27, 2000 <http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/27/decss.trial.p1.idg/index.html>. Link now defunct; preserved by Internet Archive at <https://web.archive.org/web/20060826065051/http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/27/decss.trial.p1.idg/index.html> (accessed July 29, 2023).

^[22] Numerous examples — the Diebold corporate emails and Sinclair Media boycott, the Alisher Usmanov libel case, the Wikileaks case, etc. — are provided in the appendices to Chapter Nine (“Special Agency Problems of Labor”) in Kevin A. Carson, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (Booksurge, 2008).

^[23] Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Delavan, Wisc.: Hallberg Publishing Corp., 1983), p. 80.

^[24] Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926), pp. 36-37.

^[25] Ronald Bailey, “Drug Companies Don’t Get Enough Money …,” Reason Hit&Run blog, February 22, 2006 <http://www.reason.com/blog/show/112727.html>.

^[26] Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Capetown, Singapore, São Paolo: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 70.

^[27] Ibid., p. 49.

^[28] Kevin A. Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (Blitzprint, 2004), p. 79.

^[29] Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism: Some Essays in Economic Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1940, 1960), p. 66.

^[30] Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and other Essays, p. 352, quoted in John R. Commons, Institutional Economics (New York: MacMillan, 1934), p. 664.

^[31] Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy. (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and Mcmeel, Inc., 1970, 1977), p. 71.

^[32] Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, pp. 32-33.

^[33] Scott Adams, “Is Copyright Violation Stealing?” The Dilbert Blog, April 7, 2007 <http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/04/is_copyright_vi.html>.

^[34] Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, p. 47.

^[35] Mark A. Poncelet, “Leave my underpants alone,” poncelet, April 9, 2007 <http://poncelet.livejournal.com/62034.html>. Link is now defunct.

^[36] Hodgskin, “Letter the Eighth: Evils of the Artificial Right of Property,” The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. A Series of Letters, addressed without permission to H. Brougham, Esq. M.P. F.R.S. (London: B. Steil, 1832), p. 149. Hosted at Online Library of Liberty <https://oll-resources.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/oll3/store/titles/323/0419_Bk.pdf>. Accessed July 29, 2023.
<http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=323&layout=html>

^[37] Ibid., p. 155.

^[38] David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 5.

^[39] See Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto (Center for a Stateless Society, 2010), Chapter One.

^[40] Noble, America by Design, p. 9.

^[41] Ibid., pp. 9-10.

^[42] Ibid., pp. 11-12.

^[43] Ibid., p. 12.

^[44] Ibid., p. 12.

^[45] Ibid., p. 91.

^[46] Ibid., p. 92.

^[47] Ibid., pp. 93-94.

^[48] Ibid., p. 16.

^[49] Ibid., p. 91.

^[50] Ibid., p. 89.

^[51] Ibid., p. 95.

^[52] Zingales, “In Search of New Foundations,” Journal of Finance, vol. 55 (2000), pp. 1641-1642.

^[53] Tom Peters. The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 35.

^[54] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 179.

^[55] Ibid., p. 188.

^[56] Ibid., pp. 212-13.

^[57] Ibid., pp. 32-33.

^[58] Ibid., p. 54.

^[59] Tom Coates, “(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything…” Plasticbag.org, September 3, 2003 <http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/09/weblogs_and_the_mass_ amateurisation_of_nearly_everything>. Link now defunct.

^[60] Zingales, “In Search of New Foundations,” p. 1641.

^[61] Ibid., p. 1641.

^[62] Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, “The Governance of the New Enterprise,” in Xavier Vives, ed., Corporate Governance: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 211-212.

^[63] Marjorie Kelly, “The Corporation as Feudal Estate” (an excerpt from The Divine Right of Capital) Business Ethics, Summer 2001. Quoted in GreenMoney Journal, Fall 2008 <http://greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=60&newsletterid=15>. Link now defunct.

^[64] David L Prychitko, Marxism and Workers’ Self-Management: The Essential Tension ( New York; London; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 121n.

^[65] James C. Bennett, “The End of Capitalism and the Triumph of the Market Economy,” from Network Commonwealth: The Future of Nations in the Internet Era (1998, 1999) <http://www.pattern.com/bennettj-endcap.html>.

^[66] Boldrin and Levine, pp. 105-106.

^[67] Tom Peters, The Tom Peters Seminar, p. 10.

^[68] Ibid., pp. 10-11.

^[69] Ibid., p. 11.

^[70] Ibid. p. 12.

^[71] Michael Perelman, “The Political Economy of Intellectual Property,” Monthly Review, January 2003 <http://www.monthlyreview.org/0103perelman.htm>.

^[72] Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics’ Institution (London: Printed for Charles and William Tait, Edinburgh, 1827), pp. 33-­34.

^[73] Michael Perelman, “Intellectual Property Rights and the Commodity Form: New Dimensions in the Legislative Transfer of Surplus Value,” Review of Radical Political Economics 35:3 (Summer 2003), pp. 307-308.

^[74] Perelman, Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 36.

^[75] Chakravarthi Raghavan, Recolonization: GATT, the Uruguay Round & the Third World (Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network, 1990), pp. 119-20.

^[76] Dieter Ernst, Technology, Economic Security and Latecomer Industrialization, quoted in Raghavan, Recolonization, pp. 39-40.

^[77] Martin Khor Kok Peng, The Uruguay Round and Third World Sovereignty (Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network, 1990), pp. 29-30.

^[78] Raghavan, Recolonization, p. 96.

^[79] Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 1999), p. 195.

^[80] Ibid., p. 197.

^[81] Ibid., p. 198.

^[82] Ibid., p. 201.

^[83] John Curl, For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009), pp. 33-34.

^[84] Henry George, Jr., The Menace of Privilege (New York: MacMillan, 1905), viii.

^[85] Klein, No Logo, p. 196.

^[86] Ibid., pp. 196-197.

^[87] Ibid., p. 206.

^[88] Ibid., p. 227.

^[89] Ibid., p. 212.

^[90] David Pollard, “The Future of Business,” How to Save the World, January 14, 2004 <http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/01/14.html>. Link defunct and currently available at Internet Archive <https://web.archive.org/web/20040407010652/http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/01/14.html> (accessed July 30, 2023).

^[91] Cory Doctorow, “In the age of ebooks, you don’t own your library,” Boing Boing, March 23, 2008
<https://boingboing.net/2008/03/23/in-the-age-of-ebooks.html>.

^[92] Kevin Carson, “What This Country Needs is a Good Pirated Version of Kindle E-Books,” C4SS, May 1, 2009 <http://c4ss.org/content/448>.

^[93] Janko Roettgers, “BitTorrent Researcher: Copyright Will Be Obsolete by 2010,” New York Times, January 31, 2009
<https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2009/01/31/31gigaom-bittorrent-researcher-copyright-will-be-obsolete–17305.html>.

^[94] Ink-jet printer makers “use the DMCA to threaten rivals that make compatible replacement cartridges.” Boldrin and Levine, p. 109.

^[95] Emily Matchar, “The Fight for the ‘Right to Repair’,” Smithsonian, July 13, 2016 <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/fight-right-repair-180959764/>.

^[96] Kyle Wiens, “We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership,” Wired, April 21, 2015 <https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/>.

^[97] Ryan Whitwam, “Farmers Are pirating John Deere tractor software to stick it to the man,” ExtremeTech, March 22, 2017 <https://www.extremetech.com/internet/246314-farmers-pirating-john-deere-tractor-software-stick-man>.

^[98] Boldrin and Levine, pp. 104-105.

^[99] Karl Bode, “HBO Max and Sesame Street Highlight The Stupidity Of Mindless Media Megamergers,” Techdirt, August 24, 2022 <https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/24/hbo-max-and-sesame-street-highlight-the-stupidity-of-mindless-media-megamergers/>.

^[100] Bode, “Disney Gets A Nice Fat Tax Break For Making Its Streaming Catalog Worse,” Techdirt, June 6, 2023 <https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/06/disney-gets-a-nice-fat-tax-break-for-making-its-streaming-catalog-worse/>.

^[101] Bode, “Paramount The Latest To Pull Titles From Paramount Plus Streaming Catalog For A Tax Cut And To Skimp On Paying Residuals,” Techdirt, July 5, 2023 <https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/05/paramount-the-latest-to-pull-titles-from-paramount-plus-streaming-catalog-for-a-tax-cut-and-to-skimp-on-paying-residuals/>.

^[102] Jason Bailey, “How Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Became Public Enemy Number One in Hollywood,” GQ, July 23, 2023 (preserved at Internet Archive) <https://archive.ph/2023.07.03-160323/https://www.gq.com/story/david-zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-ceo-tcm-max#selection-601.0-601.87>; Alison Foreman and Wilson Chapman, “87 Titled Unceremoniously Removed From HBO Max,” IndieWire, May 17, 2023 <https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/removed-hbo-max-movies-shows-warner-bros-discovery-merger-list/12-days-of-christmas/>.

^[103] Cory Doctorow, “IP,” Locus, September 7, 2020 <https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/>.

^[104]Cory Doctorow, “America’s largest hospital chain has an algorithmic death panel,” Pluralistic, August 5, 2023 <https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/>.

^[105] Doctorow, “Adversarial interoperability,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, October 2, 2019 <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability>.

^[106] Doctorow, “alt.interoperability.adversarial,” Boing Boing, November 23, 2019 <https://boingboing.net/2019/11/13/alt-interoperability-adversari.html>.

^[107] Doctorow, “Disruption for Thee But Not for Me,” Locus, January 7, 2019 <http://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/>.

^[108] Doctorow, “Disruption for Thee But Not for Me.”

^[109] Doctorow, “Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need competition instead,” The Economist, June 6, 2019 <https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/06/06/regulating-big-tech-makes-them-stronger-so-they-need-competition-instead>.

^[110] Glyn Moody, “New Market Research: Music Streaming Services Halve Illegal Downloads,” Techdirt, January 24, 2012 <https://www.techdirt.com/2012/01/24/new-market-research-music-streaming-services-halve-illegal-downloads/>.

^[111] Moody, “Two New Reports Confirm: Best Way To Reduce Piracy Dramatically Is To Offer Good Legal Alternatives,” Techdirt, July 25, 2013 <https://www.techdirt.com/2013/07/25/two-new-reports-confirm-best-way-to-reduce-piracy-dramatically-is-to-offer-good-legal-alternatives/>.

^[112] Karl Bode, “Too Many Streaming Exclusives Is Already Starting To Piss Users Off,” Techdirt, November 8, 2019 <https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/08/too-many-streaming-exclusives-is-already-starting-to-piss-users-off/>.

^[113] Bode, “Ironically, Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy,” Techdirt, April 5, 2019 <https://www.techdirt.com/2019/04/05/ironically-too-many-video-streaming-choices-may-drive-users-back-to-piracy/>.

^[114] Bode, “‘Subscription Fatigue’ Looms As Comcast Reveals Yet Another New Streaming TV Platform,” Techdirt, September 19, 2019 <https://www.techdirt.com/2019/09/19/subscription-fatigue-looms-as-comcast-reveals-yet-another-new-streaming-tv-platform/>.

^[115] Bode, “Ironically, Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy.”

^[116] Bode, “‘Subscription Fatigue’ Looms As Comcast Reveals Yet Another New Streaming TV Platform.”

^[117] Katharine Trendacosta, “In the internet streaming wars, viewers always lose,” Slate, February 21, 2020 <https://slate.com/technology/2020/02/netflix-hulu-disney-hbo-peacock-streaming-wars.html>.

^[118] Bode, “After Backlash From Its Dumb Password Sharing Crackdown, Netflix Lowers Prices In 100 Countries (Just Not In The U.S.),” Techdirt, February 28, 2023 <https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/28/after-backlash-from-its-dumb-password-sharing-crackdown-netflix-lowers-prices-in-100-countries-just-not-in-the-u-s/>.

^[119] Bode, “Netflix Loses A Million Subscribers In Spain After Greedy Password Sharing Crackdown,” Techdirt, May 2, 2023 <https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/02/netflix-loses-a-million-subscribers-in-spain-after-greedy-password-sharing-crackdown/>.

^[120] Bode, “Worried About Backlash, Netflix Delays Password Sharing Crackdown In U.S.,” Techdirt, May 17, 2023 <https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/17/worried-about-backlash-netflix-delays-password-sharing-crackdown-in-u-s/>.

^[121] Boldrin and Levine, pp. 10-11.

^[122] Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 36-37.

^[123] Soderberg, Hacking Capitalism, p. 116.

^[124] Boldrin and Levine, p. 1.

^[125] Ibid., p. 2.

^[126] Ibid., p. 16.

^[127] Ibid., pp. 16-19.

^[128] Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, p. 655.

^[129] Boldrin and Levine, p. 83.

^[130] Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, pp. 658-659.

^[131] Chakravarthi Raghavan, Recolonization, p. 118.

^[132] Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and Mcmeel, Inc., 1970, 1977), p. 74.

^[133] Scherer testimony, Hearings on Global and Innovation-Based Competition. FTC, 29 November 1995 <http://www.ftc.gov/opp/gc112195.pdf>. Link now defunct.

^[134] Boldrin and Levine, p. 62.

^[135] Scherer testimony.

^[136] Boldrin and Levine, pp. 232-233, 236.

^[137] Ibid., pp. 236-237.

^[138] Chris Lewis, “Public Assets, Private Profits,” Multinational Monitor, in Project Censored Yearbook 1994 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1994).

^[139] Benjamin Grove, “Gibbons Backs Drug Monopoly Bill,” Las Vegas Sun, 18 February 2000 <http://www.ahc.umn.edu/NewsAlert/Feb00/022100NewsAlert/44500.htm>. Link now defunct; preserved at Internet Archive <https://web.archive.org/web/20000919154926/http://www.ahc.umn.edu/NewsAlert/Feb00/022100NewsAlert/44500.htm> (accessed July 30, 2023).

^[140] Boldrin and Levine, p. 233.

^[141] Ibid., p. 21.

^[142] Mike Masnick, “Band Explains Why It Loves When Fans Download Unauthorized Copies Of Its Music,” Techdirt, June 26, 2012 <https://www.techdirt.com/2012/06/26/band-explains-why-it-loves-when-fans-download-unauthorized-copies-its-music/>.

^[143] Timothy B. Lee, “Swiss government: file-sharing no big deal, some downloading still OK,” Ars Technica, December 5, 2011 <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/12/swiss-government-file-sharing-no-big-deal-some-downloading-still-ok/>.

^[144] Vinay Gupta, “[Open Manufacturing] Re: Open Hardware Licensing (What a laugh),” Open Manufacturing email list at Google Groups, May 7, 2009 <https://groups.google.com/g/openmanufacturing/c/0kYgCHMQ_r4?hl=en&pli=1>.